Finding Meaning in the Struggle of Work Construct Redundancy in Work Importance Measurement

It is suggested that work importance research has suffered from construct proliferation, and that the literature would benefit from returning to Dubin's (1956) original notion of work importance as a general construct - representing the degree to which work plays a central role in one's life space. Measures of three work importance constructs (i.e., work involvement, job involvement, work ethic endorsement) were administered to (n = 758) working adults from the USA to examine dimensionality using bifactor analysis. Results showed the bifactor model fit the data better than a one-factor or three-factor model. The bifactor model suggests that both general and domain-specific factors appear to exist, but that the general work importance factor predicts most work outcomes to a substantial degree.