strumentality, expectancy) theory. It
helped me to organize the evidence on
such problems as occupational choice,
job satisfaction, and motivation for effective
work performance and pointed
to some aspects of each of these phenomena
that had not received sufficient
attention.
I decided to devote the summer of
1961 to writing a short monograph to
communicate the core concepts of “my
structure” to others. The enterprise
took substantially longer than expected
to complete, and the product evolved
from a 150-page monograph to a book
that exceeded 300 pages. I can still vividly
recall the advice of mentors and of
peers who strongly urged me to abandon
the project and to devote my energies
to empirical investigations that
could be reported in short articles. The
writing of books, particularly those of
an integrative and theoretical nature,
was an activity more suited to bearded
and tenured professors than to a young
assistant professor launching an academic
career. It gives me great satisfaction
to know that this book has been so
widely cited. I know that producing it
met my needs, and the frequency of citation
suggests to me that it also met
the needs of others in the profession.
I think the book has served two
somewhat different functions for its
readers. For some it has been something
like a reference book—a critical
appraisal of existing research on a large
number of topics. For others, its utility
has resided in the underlying theory
and, more generally, in the possibility
of organizing knowledge in terms of a
simple and a coherent set of concepts
and relationships. The latter is far
closer to my intended purpose and I am
gratified by the fact that the last decade
has brought about a marked increase
in the use of motivational theories
in industrial and organizational
psychology.1
-3
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