Would you work if you won the lottery? Tracking changes in the American work ethic.

Scott Highhouse · Michael J. Zickar · Maya Yankelevich

95 citations0/0 files storedJournal of Applied Psychology

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Education and Work Dynamics Cultural Differences and Values Culture, Economy, and Development Studies

Abstract

Although many social scientists and political commentators have speculated that the American work ethic is in decline, the last longitudinal study of this issue was conducted by Vecchio (1980) on data collected over 30 years ago. Vecchio examined whether workers would wish to continue working even if it were not financially necessary (i.e., the so-called lottery question from the National Opinion Research Center survey) and concluded that there had been a significant decline in work ethic since the 1950s. In the current study, the authors used an updated data set that included data from 1980 through 2006 and found evidence for a declining trend since Vecchio's study, although the decline seems to be leveling out. Demographic characteristics do not account for this apparent decline in shared sentiments about the importance of work for a productive life. The authors caution against drawing definitive conclusions, given the limitations of the lottery item as a measure of work ethic.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 95 citations exist upstream.

References

2000Democracy in America 2001Crafting a Job: Revisioning Employees as Active Crafters of Their Work 1997Overall job satisfaction: How good are single-item measures?1989Applied psychology : an international review 1979The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations 1981The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations 1996A meta-analysis and review of organizational research on job involvement.2001Single-Item Reliability: A Replication and Extension

Cited by

2013Generational Changes in Materialism and Work Centrality, 1976-2007 2016Placing Job Characteristics in Context: Cross-Temporal Meta-Analysis of Changes in Job Characteristics Since 1975 2017Meaningful Work and Affective Commitment: A Moderated Mediation Model of Positive Work Reflection and Work Centrality 2011Rebranding Employment Branding: Establishing a New Research Agenda to Explore the Attributes, Antecedents, and Consequences of Workers' Employment Brand Knowledge 2019Construction and Initial Validation of the Work Orientation Questionnaire

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.