Job Typologies

A frequent need in organizations and organizational research is to classify individual positions or jobs into groups, with each group being internally homogeneous in terms of a profile of relevant psychological characteristics (e.g., abilities, personality) and situational characteristics (e.g., job requirements, organizational culture), yet externally distinct from all other groups. A job typology either is an established framework—and several major ones will be reviewed here—or is derived through analytic procedures applied to data at the individual and/or job level. But in either case, job typologies contain groups of jobs that, to a greater or lesser extent, adhere to the aforementioned principle of internal consistency and external distinctiveness. This classification process is similar in spirit to factor analysis, in the sense that it summarizes a vast ...