As a doctoral candidate in psychology
at Michigan in the late 1950s, I became
fascinated with the structure of
psychological theories and spent endless
hours reading and thinking about
the commonalities and differences
among the existing theories. At the
same time, I became increasingly
aware of the atheoretical state of the
fields of industrial and organizational
psychology that I was studying. Immediately
upon completing my PhD, I set
about the ambitious task of laying out a
theoretical structure for many of the
phenomena of interest to the industrial
psychologist. The particular structure
that I found helpful has come to be
called expectancy or VIE (valence, in