The Factor Structure of Level I: Life Styles Inventory

Abstract

Level I: Life Styles Inventory is a personal assessment instrument which has been used as a diagnostic tool in various programs for organizational change and individual development. The inventory measures twelve different life styles that are postulated to fall into four general areas of concern: Task/satisfaction; people/satisfaction; task/security; and people/security (Lafferty, 1973). This four-factor model of personal life styles was derived by combining need theory (Maslow, 1954) with personversus task-centered models of leadership (Stogdill, 1963; Blake and Mouton, 1964). In this paper, Level I data from 1000 employees were factor analyzed to empirically test the validity of this four-factor model. Principal components analysis with varimax rotation yielded three factors: People/security; satisfaction; and task/security. While these factors generally are consistent with the underlying dimensions postulated by Lafferty, the second factor (satisfaction) includes both task and people concerns. Additional analyses show these three empirically-derived factors to be differentially related to the salary, organizational level, and managerial specialty of respondents. These results are discussed in terms of the possible effects of organizations on the personal life styles of their members.