| The research linking technology and psychological outcomes has been conducted almost exclusively with an industrial focus. This research consistently finds greater job satisfaction among workers doing skilled rather than unskilled work. Behavioral technologies such as psychotherapy can also be described in terms of their skill demands. It follows that psychologists' attitudes toward their work may vary as a function of the skill demands of the technology they use. The general hypothesis here is that more routinized levels of psychotherapeutic technology, e.g., cognitive-behavior therapies, will be associated with reductions in therapists' satisfaction with their work, when compared to psychodynamic forms of therapy.;Two hundred fifty-one psychologists in independent practice, selected randomly from APA Division 42, completed questionnaires concerning their theoretical orientations to psychotherapy and their attitudes toward various aspects of their work. The questionnaire was modeled after the Job Diagnostic Survey of Richard Hackman and his colleagues. Similar items on the survey were combined to give composite measures of core job dimensions proposed by Hackman and others. These dimensions include such things as opportunities to express competence through one's work, job involvement, task identity, task significance, skill variety, feedback about performance, status, and overall job satisfaction. In addition, measures of satisfaction with income, working conditions, and client relations were made. Finally, respondents were given the opportunity to describe the most and least satisfying aspects of their work.;Results supported the general hypothesis, particularly where the satisfaction of higher-order needs was involved. That is, psychodynamic therapists reported more involvement with their work, more opportunity to express competence, more enjoyment of client relations, and greater overall satisfaction and fewer dissatisfactions with their work than did cognitive-behavior therapists. No differences were found concerning satisfaction with income, status, working conditions, or task significance. The implication is that routinized work is intrinsically less satisfying than nonroutinized work, even at the level of the independent practitioner. |
