Journal of Applied Psychology 1985, Vol. 70, No. 3, 469-t80 Copyright 1985 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0021-9010/85/$00.75 Stability in the Midst of Change: A Dispositional Approach to Job Attitudes Barry M. Staw University of California, Berkeley Jerry Ross Simon Fraser University Most recent debates on the determinants of job attitudes have concentrated on situational theories, stressing external influences such as job design and social information processing. In contrast, this research examines the dispositional argument that job attitudes are rather consistent within individuals, showing stability both over time and across situations. To test this notion, longitudinal data on job satisfaction were analyzed from a national sample of over 5,000 middle-aged men. Results showed significant stability of attitudes over a 5-year time period and significant cross-situational consistency when individuals changed employers and/or occupations. Prior attitudes were also a stronger predictor of subsequent job satisfaction than either changes in pay or the social status of one's job. The implications of these results for developing dispositional theories of work behavior are discussed, along with possible implications for popular situational theories such as job design and social information processing. In recent years almost all research on job attitudes has been situationally based. Situa- tional variables such as task characteristics, supervision, pay, and working conditions have been commonly isolated as determinants of job attitudes (Locke, 1976), and perceptions of these aspects of the work context are frequently aggregated into indices of job sat- isfaction (e.g., Quinn & Sheppard, 1974; Weiss, Dawis, England, & Lofquist, 1967). Rarely, however, are job attitudes formulated as having an endogenous source of variance, one that is reflective of the ongoing state of the person as opposed to being a product of the situation. The prevailing emphasis on situational de- terminants of job attitudes is probably best exemplified in the recent controversy over the effects of job design. In one camp have We wish to thank Charles O'Reilly and Jeffrey Pfeffer for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript. The data used in this study were obtained from the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Re- search. The data were originally collected by the Center for Human Resource Research, Ohio State University. Neither the original collector of the data nor the Con- sortium bear any responsibility for the analysis or inter- pretation presented in this article. Request for reprints should be sent to Barry M. Staw, School of Business Administration, University of Califor- nia, Berkeley, California 94720. been job design researchers who have posited that objective job characteristics are the major determinants of work attitudes and behavior, with improvements in job satisfaction coming as a product of job enrichment and enlarge- ment interventions (e.g., Hackman &Old- ham, 1976, 1980, Lawler, 1982). In a second camp have been researchers who have taken a social information processing perspective, arguing that job attitudes can be altered by social influence and contextual cues (e.g., Salancik & Pfeffer, 1977, 1978, O'Reilly & Caldwell, 1979; White & Mitchell, 1979). Although these two approaches are generally considered to be diametrically opposed, it should be recognized that they both empha- size the role of situational forces on job attitudes. Although job design researchers often use individual characteristics as a mod- erating variable, neither the job design nor the information processing perspectives rec- ognize that work attitudes can be directly affected by dispositional variables. The confrontation between social infor- mation processing and more traditional job design approaches has contributed to two recent shifts in theories about how people react to work environments. The first change has been greater emphasis on subjective fac- tors that can condition work attitudes, leading to a more malleable model of job satisfaction. The second shift has been a greater emphasis 469