The Effect of Significant Other's Job Complexity on Employee Reactions to Work

This research examines the interaction of individual employee job complexity with the job complexity of significant others in determining employee reactions to work. Procedures and hypotheses are based on principles of equity theory. For each employee, a composite significant other's job complexity index was formed by averaging the job complexity scores of all individuals within the focal employee'sjob classification who were of the same sex as the focal. Results show significant interactions between this "comparison other"job complexity measure and the job complexity of the focal employee. Specifically, results show that employees who work on jobs of greater complexity than their colleagues have lower satisfaction and higher productivity than employees who work on jobs comparable in complexity to those of comparison others. Employees who work on jobs of lesser complexity than their co-workers have slightly lower satisfaction and productivity than employees who work on jobs comparable in complexity to those of comparison others. Implications of these results for the practice of work redesign are discussed.