Expectancy theory and job behavior

Abstract

Job attitude and behavior data were collected over the period of a year for 69 managers in a retail sales organization. Expectancy attitudes were found to be significantly related to some measures of effort and performance. However, weighting expectancy attitudes by valence measures did not increase the ability of expectancy attitudes to predict behavior. Crosslagged correlational analyses were done, but they provided little support for the view that expectancy attitudes cause performance. Ability and role perception measures were combined with the expectancy measures in order to predict performance, and this led to a significant multiple correlation with performance. The implications of these findings for the further development and testing of expectancy theory are discussed.