| Abstract: | This article reports on the development of an instrument for assessing the personal work goals of employees. The Work Concerns Inventory (WCI) combines idiographic and nomothetic methods to obtain a list of employee work goals and characterizations of those goals on behavior-relevant variables. The goal characteristics assessed on the WCI come from expectancy-value and behavioristic models of goal choice. The internal structure and validity of the WCI for predicting goal-directed behavior were examined in a field study involving 172 employees. The results indicated support for most hypotheses. The hypothesized relationships among the instrument's scales were supported. Goal characteristics predicted the frequency of goal-directed behavior, indicating that optimal prediction of behavior was achieved through the use of both cognitive and operant variables. The findings support the validity of the WCI and promote future research on how personal work goals influence organizational behavior. |
