SELECTING JOB-CONTENT VERSUS JOB-CONTEXT INFORMATION - A FIELD-STUDY OF THE ROLES OF NEED FOR CLOSURE AND PRIOR PREFERENCES

A field study was conducted in a job-interview setting among female se cretarial job applicants with previously expressed preferences for rec eiving information either about job content or about job context. The results showed that (a) under high as opposed to low need for closure, job applicants requested more job information, whether for job conten t or job context; (b) across experimental conditions, subjects preferr ed job-context information; (c) high need for closure selectively redu ced the job-context information requested by applicants who had expres sed a preference for job-content characteristics as compared with subj ects who had expressed a preference for job-context characteristics, b ut it did not reduce the need for job-content information of applicant s with a job-context preference; and (d) under high need for closure, job applicants who had previously expressed a preference for job-conte nt characteristics did, in fact, perceive job-content information as m ore important than job-context information, and subjects who had expre ssed a preference for job-context type of characteristics perceived jo b-context characteristics as more important.