SELECTING INFORMATION ON JOB CONTENT OR JOB CONTEXT - THE MODERATING EFFECT OF ONES OWN EPISTEMIC AUTHORITY

The study investigated the effect of self-ascribed epistemic authority (SAEA) on proclivity to choose information either about job content o r about job context. Subjects expressed their attitudes toward a job o ffer on the basis of information either about job content alone or abo ut job content and job context. It was found that in the process of ev aluating a job offer, people with different levels of SAEA tended to f ocus on different kinds of information-job-content or job-context char acteristics. The higher the SAEA, the greater was the effect of job-co ntent characteristics on their evaluation of the job offer. By contras t, when the job-content characteristics were supplemented with attract ive job-context characteristics, the relationship between SAEA and job -offer evaluation was low and insignifcant. Subjects low on SAEA had r elatively low preference for using job-content characteristics as crit eria for job-offer evaluation.