Predictiveness of Orientation toward God at the Workplace

Abstract

We hypothesized that people's cognitive styles characterized as concrete or abstract and expressed by orientation toward God are the fundamental belief relevant to their attitudes in general. We predicted that people's answers to questions having to do with their personal relationship to God, their obedience to God's will, and their trust in God ties their attitudes toward a particular context to their most basic beliefs about the world. Participants were presented 12 scenarios describing specific workplace situations known to be of concern to a wide variety of persons and a selection of possible responses characteristic of different cognitive styles. The participants were then asked to rate the likelihood that they would use each of the possible responses. Analysis showed that “God-centered” persons' scores on these questionnaires had substantially stronger correlations with more general attitudes and that there was more consistency in selection of response styles across all workplace situations than were those of persons not characterized as “God-centered.”