motivational analysis of organizations

5. Team leader (9, 9)—With emphasis on the interdependence of people by
involving them and their ideas in determining the strategies and conditions for
task achievement, this approach has maximal concern for task and people.
The content of the ISS was based on Hershenson’s functional organization of
student personnel services: internal coordinating, orienting, supportive, and educative.
Twelve job situations, three representative of each of Hershenson’s four functional
areas, were written. The specific situations were selected as typical of those encountered
by a student personnel administrator in meeting his or her usual job responsibilities. All
items were submitted to a panel of five judges with the request that they identify the
strategy that the various alternatives were supposed to depict. The criterion of agreement
chosen for accepting the item was that four judges agree with the intended key, rewriting
those items that did not meet this criterion.
An item analysis of the ISS demonstrated that there is a consistency in the way
people respond to the twelve items. That is, if a respondent ranks a given style high for
one student personnel situation, he or she is more likely to express a high preference for
the same intervention style in other situations.
The respondent is presented with a job situation encountered by student personnel
administrators and indicates his or her personal preference for each of the five optional
responses along a ten-point scale. In so doing, the respondent reveals a preferential
ordering of the options and also a scale weight for each option, as there are twice as
many scale weights as there are response options. By using such a response format in
the ISS, the ipsative character of forced-choice items is partially avoided. Ipsative scores
lead to problems in statistical analysis, as they are not independent and therefore do not
meet a major assumption on which many statistical procedures are based.
A score for each of the five styles of intervention is obtained by summing the scale
weights of the corresponding options for all twelve items. This means that the range of
scores for any intervention style is 0 to 108.
Internal consistency estimates (Cronbach’s alpha) and stability estimates of the ISS
indicated that the instrument has adequate reliability for group administration and
interpretation. However, its utilization for individual interpretation or diagnostic
procedures is questionable.
In the study for which the ISS was developed, it was administered to random
samples of students (STUD), student personnel administrators (SPA), faculty (FAC),
and counselors (COUNS) at the three state universities in Iowa. The scores of the 482
respondents on each style of intervention were analyzed by multiple discriminant
analysis, simple ANOVA, t-ratios and chi square. The results of the discriminant
analysis, using the Mahalanobis D2 , indicated that there are significant differences in the
perceptions of student personnel administrators, faculty, students, and counselors as to
what intervention styles are appropriate in student personnel job situations. While
students and counselors’ perceptions are comparably close to those of student personnel
administrators, faculty are distinctly more distant. The “team leader” style had the
highest mean response for each group. The differences in the strength of preference that
38 ❘❚
The Pfeiffer Library Volume 19, 2nd Edition. Copyright © 1998 Jossey-Bass/Pfeiffer