Correlates of Employee Attitudes Toward Functional Flexibility

Public service employees (3044) completed a questionnaire seeking information on their expectations regarding a proposal to increase their functional flexibility. It was proposed that beliefs concerning the unfavorability of outcomes of the intervention would be correlated with a range of biographical, affective, and job content variables. Multivariate analyses revealed that the scope of an employees' existing job and biographical variables (apart from age) were not generally predictive of attitudes to functional flexibility. Rather, unfavorable attitudes were weakly associated with low levels of extrinsic satisfaction, perceived reward equity, aspiration organizational commitment, and age. The implications of these findings for work and skills restructuring interventions and organizational change in general are discussed.