Cognitive Complexity with Employees from Entrepreneurial Financial Information Service Organizations and Educational Institutions: An Extension and Replication Looking at Pay, Benefits, and Leadership

INTRODUCTION Cognitive processing is one of the central topics of interest for selection (Bobko, Roth & Potosky, 1999), training (Warr & Bunce, 1995), compensation (Carraher & Buckley, 1996) and employee-job matching purposes (Van Vianen, 2000) both domestically and internationally (Culpepper & Watts, 1999) and yet its influence on instrument construction has largely been ignored in the literature (Roberts & Stankov, 1999). Work on cognitive complexity, on the other hand, goes back more than 45 years to Kelly's theory of personality (1955) but so too has its potential influence on instrumentation issues been largely ignored (Carraher & Buckley, 1996). In general, cognitive complexity is a construct intended to indicate how an individual conceptualizes of his or her environment. It is based on Kelly's (1955) theory of personality which is founded on the premise that each individual has available a certain number of personal constructs or dimensions for cognizing and perceiving of events in their social world. It emphasizes the nature of constructs and the differences among individuals in the types and number of constructs that they employ when evaluating their external environment. We are interested with the conceptualization of cognitive complexity as concerned exclusively with the differentiation of the number of dimensions of judgment used by an individual rather than with other aspects of differentiation (Bieri et al., 1966) and how mean group differences in cognitive complexity could influence the observed dimensionalities of psychological instruments. Research on cognitive complexity has been reviewed by Stish (1997) and Streufert (1997). PAY SATISFACTION AND BEYOND In 1979, Heneman and Schwab theorized that pay could meaningfully be broken down into 4 distinct categories: (1) the methods organizations use to determine actual pay levels (pay systems), (2) the hierarchy of pay levels among differing jobs within organizations (pay structures), (3) actual levels of pay received by employees (pay levels) and (4) the types of pay received by employees (pay forms). However, as with prior reviews of the literature (Nash & Carroll, 1975; Schwab & Wallace, 1974), they largely ignored the necessity of measuring pay satisfaction in a multidimensional fashion and recommended the continued use of the Job Descriptive Index and the Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire to measure pay satisfaction. These two instruments were (and still are) unidimensional with respect to the measurement of pay satisfaction. In 1985, they further hypothesized that when concerned with pay satisfaction, the four posited facets of pay should be measured with five independent dimensions--satisfaction with pay level, benefits, raises, structure, and administration. They developed an instrument to measure these five dimensions and then administered it to three heterogeneous groups of 355 white-collar employees and 1,980 nurses. The results from both confirmatory factor analyses and exploratory principal components analyses led them to refine the instrument and to conclude that pay satisfaction should be measured in 4 dimensions--combining pay structure and administration into a single dimension. The final result was an 18-item instrument hypothesized to measure pay satisfaction in 4 dimensions that they called the Pay Satisfaction Questionnaire (PSQ). Prompted by their results, they called for additional research on pay satisfaction and on their new instrument (Heneman & Schwab, 1985). Since this call for more research on the PSQ, much additional research has been conducted. Ash, Lee, and Dreher (1985); and Ash, Dreher, and Bretz (1986, 1987); have examined several of the psychometric properties of the PSQ while over a dozen studies utilizing over forty data sets have explored the dimensionality of the PSQ (see Carraher & Buckley, 1996; for a list of dimensionality studies). Noticeable in the research on the dimensionality of the PSQ has been the inconsistency in the number of dimensions found for the PSQ. …