It is also in our nature: Genetic influences on work characteristics and in explaining their relationships with well‐being

• Author: Wen‐Dong Li,Zhaoli Song,Zhen Zhang,Richard D. Arvey
• Published date: 01 August 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2079
• Date: 01 August 2016

It is also in our nature: Genetic influences on work

characteristics and in explaining their relationships

with well-being

WEN-DONG LI

1

*, ZHEN ZHANG

2

, ZHAOLI SONG

3

AND RICHARD D. ARVEY

3

1

Department of Psychological Sciences, Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas, U.S.A.

2

W. P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, U.S.A.

3

Department of Management and Organization, National University of Singapore, Singapore

Summary Work design research typically views employee work characteristics as being primarily determined by the

work environment and has thus paid less attention to the possibility that the person may also influence em-

ployee work characteristics and in turn accounts for the work characteristics–well-being relationships through

selection. Challenging this conventional view, we investigated the role of a fundamental individual difference

variable—people’s genetic makeup—in affecting work characteristics (i.e., job demands, job control, social

support at work, and job complexity) and in explaining why work characteristics relate to subjective and

physical well-being. Our findings based on a national US twin sample show sizable genetic influences on

job demands, job control, and job complexity, but not on social support at work. Such genetic influences were

partly attributed to genetic factors associated with core self-evaluations. Both genetic and environmental in-

fluences accounted for the relationships between work characteristics and well-being, but to varying degrees.

The results underscore the importance of the person, in addition to the work environment, in influencing em-

ployee work characteristics and explaining the underlying nature of the relationships between employee work

characteristics and their well-being. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Keywords: work characteristics; well-being; genetics; environment; core self-evaluations

"[I]n an important sense human nature (i.e., what it means to be human), as well as any accurate description of the

kind of species we are, is all about work and working."

—Howard Weiss, Working as Human Nature, p. 37, 2013

Work design research has played an essential role in organizational psychology (Hackman & Oldham, 1975;

Morgeson, Garza, & Campion, 2012; Parker, 2014). Theories of work design have been rated as among the few the-

ories with both scientific validity and practical significance (Miner, 2003). Meta-analytic evidence has documented

that work characteristics, a core concept of work design research pertaining to various attributes of work including

tasks and social relationships, profoundly influence employee job performance and well-being (Humphrey,

Nahrgang, & Morgeson, 2007).

Work design research has traditionally deemed that the work environment, such as managers and organizations,

predominantly determines employee work characteristics (Oldham & Hackman, 2010). This is understandable given

the top-down approaches adopted by most researchers in examining management practices that can fuel employee

performance and well-being. Nevertheless, treating work environments as primary antecedents of work characteris-

tics has left important questions largely unaddressed. First, it is less well understood to what extent the person can

affect employee work characteristics (Grant & Parker, 2009; Oldham & Hackman, 2010; Parker, Wall, & Cordery,

2001). This is unfortunate, because various streams of research on person–environment fit have underscored the

*Correspondence to: Wen-Dong Li, Department of Psychological Sciences, Kansas State University, 492 Bluemont Hall, Manhattan, Kansas

66506-5302, U.S.A. E-mail: oceanbluepsy@gmail.com

Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Received 03 October 2014

Revised 20 November 2015, Accepted 28 November 2015

Journal of Organizational Behavior, J. Organiz. Behav. 37, 868–888 (2016)

Published online 15 January 2016 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/job.2079

Research Article

indispensable role of the person in influencing individuals’work characteristics (e.g., Holland, 1996; Ilgen &

Hollenbeck, 1991; Schneider, 1987) to gain optimal levels of fit (Kristof-Brown & Guay, 2010). Work design

research has just recently embraced the importance of the person in proactively affecting work characteristics

(e.g., Frese, Garst, & Fay, 2007; Tims & Bakker, 2010; Tims, Bakker, & Derks, 2013; Wrzesniewski & Dutton,

2001). Therefore, Parker et al. (2001) suggested “afinal point about antecedents [of work characteristics] is that

consideration should also be given to individual factors”(p. 421). Likewise, Oldham and Hackman (2010) urged

future research to study “what are the characteristics of those people who are most likely to spontaneously cus-

tomize their jobs”(p. 471).

Second and more important, the traditional emphasis on environmental effects on work characteristics has led to a

presumption that the relations between work characteristics and outcomes (e.g., well-being) are predominantly

caused by the environment. As such, individual characteristics have primarily been treated as moderators in the work

characteristic–outcome relations (Morgeson et al., 2012). Managers and organizations affect work characteristics.

Yet, research on person–environment fit (Kristof-Brown & Guay, 2010) has shown that the person can also

influence employee work via various processes of selection, that is, occupational/job selection (Holland, 1996;

McCormick, Jeanneret, & Mecham, 1972) and organizational selection (Schneider, 1987). During such processes,

individuals select work environments that are congruent with their individual characteristics. Hence, the work

characteristic–well-being relations may also be attributed to influences from the person through selection (Oldham

& Hackman, 2010). Therefore, it is informative to examine the relative potency of influences from the person and

from the environment in explaining those relations. Such an investigation provides a finer-grained understanding

of why work characteristics are related to well-being, that is, because of “selection”or “environmental causation”

(Johnson, Turkheimer, Gottesman, & Bouchard, 2009, p. 218).

The current study represents an initial endeavor to address these two issues by examining genetic influences—

reflecting influences from the person as a whole versus influences from the environment—as well as environmental

influences on work characteristics and in explaining the relationships between work characteristics and well-being.

Genetic influences serve as an appropriate vehicle to study influences from the person versus those from the envi-

ronment (Johnson et al., 2009). One important reason is that work characteristics may be affected by a number of

individual characteristics such as various personalities (e.g., Fried, Hollenbeck, Slowik, Tiegs, & Ben-David,

1999; Spector, Jex, & Chen, 1995). Hence, it seems impractical to include all possible individual characteristics si-

multaneously in one study in order to capture the “whole”influence from the person. Genetic factors modulate vir-

tually all individual characteristics (Turkheimer, 2000), so estimated genetic influences on work characteristics are

able to reflect aggregated contributions of all hard-wired influences from the person (Johnson et al., 2009). For the

same reason, genetic effects involved in the relations between work characteristics and well-being indicate influ-

ences from all possible person-related factors operative in the relations channeled through selection. Recognizing

the importance of examining the relative potency of the person (i.e., genetic influences) and the environment in

explaining important phenomena in organizational research, Judge, Ilies, and Zhang (2012) pointed out that relation-

ships “can only be properly understood once we consider the degree to which these relationships are due to genetic

effects, environment effects, or both”(p. 209).

We adopt a behavioral genetic approach based on a national US twin sample. This approach takes advantages

of the quasi-natural experiments by comparing co-twin similarities between identical and fraternal twins (who

share 100% and 50% of genes on average, respectively) to model relative genetic and environmental influences

(Plomin, Owen, & McGuffin, 1994). We draw on the widely adopted job demand–control–support model

(Karasek, 1979; Karasek & Theorell, 1990) to examine genetic influences on three perceived work characteris-

tics: job demands, job control, and social support at work. We also include objectively measured job complexity

as an omnibus work characteristic (Morgeson et al., 2012). To further explore some of the pathways of genetic

influences on work characteristics, we examine the role of core self-evaluations (CSE, Judge, Locke, & Durham,

1997). CSE is a broad-band personality construct composed of four lower-order personality traits, thus it tends

to capture related genetic influences through various mechanisms of selection on work characteristics (Judge

et al., 1997).

GENETICS, WORK CHARACTERISTICS, AND WELL-BEING 869

Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J. Organiz. Behav. 37, 868–888 (2016)

DOI: 10.1002/job