The Occupational Engagement Scale for Employed Adults - Revised (OES-EA-R): Further validation and correlations with personality and Holland code type
Today's employees are now their own greatest advocates in the workplace. The new employee contract demands that individuals take on the responsibility for guiding their own career paths. As such, all applied psychologists need more "knowledge about work to assist clients with issues related to work choice, entry, and adjustment" (DeBell, 2006, p. 325). While numerous scholars in the field of vocational psychology have developed models of career exploration or career development, there has never been a cohesive melding of these well-developed, yet individualized entities, despite recognition of the need. In such an attempt, Krieshok, Black, and McKay (under review) created the trilateral model of adaptive career decision-making. As its name suggests, the model is made-up of three components, including reason, intuition, and engagement. Engagement has served as a natural point of departure for initial research, as Krieshok et al. (p. 24) describe it as a "method by which the rational and intuitive dialectic can be converted into a dynamic that serves adaptive career decision-making." Given that only a single study has been conducted on the employed adult strata, this study continued efforts in the validation of the Occupational Engagement Scale-Employed Adults (Scott, 2006) instrument, specifically examining whether the measure factored out in a similar manner as the initial line of research. A screening measure was used to briefly assess participants' levels of job satisfaction, as gauged by the Job Satisfaction Blank (Hoppock, 1935). The OES-EA-R was also compared and contrasted with scales from the NEO-FFI (Costa & McCrae, 1992), an abbreviated Big Five personality measure. Additionally, the OES-EA-R was examined for any significant differences among occupations falling within varying Holland code types. Based upon three predetermined criteria, 32 employed adults were removed from the pool of participants. An additional 47 individuals were eliminated based upon the job satisfaction screening measure, resulting in 262 participants in the final sample. The participants' reported occupations were categorized according to the Dictionary of Holland Occupational Codes (DHOC; Gottfredson & Holland, 1996), resulting in the following breakdown of 25 Realistic (10%), 43 Investigative (16%), 26 Artistic (10%), 64 Social (24%), 70 Enterprising (27%), and 34 Conventional (13%). Utilizing Maximum Likelihood analysis, two primary factors were revealed. Scale 1 consisted of 10 items and was named "Job Curiosity," as the items seemed to depict a similar construct as the one named by Scott (2006) in the first validation study. Scale 2 consisted of 10 items and was named "Job Involvement," again mirroring Scott's 2006 OES-EA second scale. Analyses of variance revealed significant differences among the varying Holland code types on the OES-EA-R. Correlational analyses indicated significant relationships among specific personality traits and the OES-EA-R. The implications of this study were discussed and future directions proposed.
Psychology, Clinical, Psychology, Industrial, Business Administration, Management, Job Curiosity, Job Involvement, NEO-FFI, Tri-Lateral Model of Adaptive Career Decision-Making, Krieshok, Reason, Intuition
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