Job Enlargement, Individual Differences, and Worker Responses

To test the Hulin-Blood hypothesis that job enlargement is only positively associated with job satisfaction among workers who are "involved" in their jobs, three groups of black workers in South Africa performing jobs of different sizes or degrees of enlargement were given a measure of individual urbanization and a Xhosa version of the Brayfield-Rothe index of job satisfaction. On the basis of their scores on the measure of urbanization and the length of time they had spent in a city or town of "white" South Africa, the subjects in each group were divided into Western and tribal subgroups. The level of job satisfaction of the three Western subgroups increased significantly as their jobs became larger or more enlarged, whereas those of the tribal subgroups remained the same-supporting the hypothesis.