Abstract: Introduction: A growing body of literature has been focusing on sources of variance in job analysis ratings and there are mainly two theories to explain differences in job analysis ratings under the same job title, treating these differences as substantial differences and perceptual differences respectively. The objective of this study was to explore the effects of job attitudes, job satisfaction, affective commitment and job involvement, on job skill ratings using data from incumbents of four jobs after partialing out variance due to other variables, and to figure out which of the three job attitudes would have the strongest influence on skill ratings.
Method: Two skill scales, both importance and level, from Occupational Information Network (O*NET) were administered to 272 job incumbents of four jobs, human resource managers in public sectors (50), computer software designers (54), web editors (100) and newspaper salesmen (68). Hierarchical regression analyses were adopted to test hypotheses.
Results: The results indicated that, after controlling for effects of jobs and individual demographic variables, job satisfaction, affective commitment and job involvement had significant effects on skill ratings, both importance and level ones. Specifically, job satisfaction significantly affected importance and level ratings of organizational skills and cognitive skills, as well as level ratings of technical skills. Affective commitment had significant positive effects on both importance and level ratings of cognitive skills. Besides, the effects of job involvement were positively significant on both importance and level ratings of organizational and cognitive skills. It was also found that among the three affective variables of interest, job satisfaction had the strongest impact on both skill importance and level ratings.
Conclusions: This study extended studies on sources of variance in job analysis by exploring effects of job attitudes on job skill importance and level ratings with other variables controlled for on data across a variety of jobs, including management, research and development, and sales. Coupled with findings in previous studies, the findings of this study also suggested that job attitudes influence job analysis ratings on many scales, including importance, level scales. Finally, among the three job attitude variables studied, this study suggested that job satisfaction had the relatively strongest affects on skill ratings. HR professional need collect job information from job incumbents with both high and low level job attitudes when conducting job analysis

Key words: Job Analysis, O*NET, Job Satisfaction, Affective Commitment, Job Involvement