An Examination of the Cognitive Processes Used to Handle Employee Job Problems

A study examined some antecedents and consequences of the cognitive processes employees in 2 business organizations used in handling their job problems. Job problems are the issues, decisions, and tasks that employees handle in their work. Two situational characteristics, discrepancy between a goal and performance and the frequency of a problem's occurrence, and 2 individual characteristics, cognitive complexity and the accessibility of "script tracks" (conceptual structures) in memory, were found to be associated with these cognitive processes. Job complexity moderated the relationship of cognitive complexity with promotability. Given that the 2 companies studied were greatly different in terms of employee and organizational demographics, the consistency of the results obtained across company samples suggests that the results are robust.