Social Information Processing Model

Fundamentals

SIP posits that, as adaptive organisms, individuals modify their attitudes and behavior to accommodate to the social environment in which they exist, as well as to their own past behaviors. The most commonly studied dependent variables have been perceptions of job characteristics—autonomy, variety, and so forth—and job attitudes such as overall satisfaction with the job and with particular facets of satisfaction, such as pay and the quality of supervision. In fewer instances, the dependent variables have included actual behaviors, particularly turnover (e.g., voluntarily quitting).

The first prediction is that social information affects perceptions of job attributes and job attitudes. The prediction has been tested using both field data and experiments. One experimental paradigm involved designing tasks that varied in their characteristics as assessed by others and then randomly assigning people to either enriched (more interesting and challenging) or unenriched (routine activities with little variety or autonomy) tasks and also exposing subjects to information that suggested that the tasks they were working on as part of the experiment were either enriched and challenging or not. Social information not only affected task perceptions but had an effect larger than the actual job characteristics. A typical field study design assessed the extent to which people working together and in frequent contact with each other shared perceptions of task characteristics and job attitudes. One study design asked whether people in contact had a higher degree of consensus on perceptions of job attributes and their job attitudes than others doing similar work but located in different units that had less (or even no) contact.

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