Task Enjoyment as an Individual Difference Construct

Abstract

Are there individual differences in the tendency to enjoy tasks regardless of the tasks’ contents or situational determinants? To answer this question, we constructed and validated the six-item Trait Task Enjoyment Scale (TTES). In Study 1, it had an internally consistent one-factor structure (pooled N = 997); good test-retest reliabilities over 1 and 4 months; measurement invariance regarding gender (strong) and time (partial strong); and was not redundant with respect to a large number of theoretically related constructs. In Studies 2 and 3, the TTES predicted self-reported momentary task enjoyment, one of its opposites, boredom, and voluntary persistence in a free-choice paradigm. It did so for various tasks, including thirty diverse tasks presented in vignettes and a memory task in the lab. Results suggest that the TTES may predict momentary task enjoyment regardless of objective task aversiveness or, in this case, equally well for tasks with boring or enjoyable contents. The TTES addresses an important gap in current research on task enjoyment and is an adequately valid and reliable research tool.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Rudolf Debelak and Chris Napolitano for methodological advice; Mirjam Ghassemi for helpful comments on an earlier version of this article; Corinne Kamm, Valentina Basciani, Laura Tophinke, and Michèle Hediger for their help with data collection; Corinne Kamm, Claudio Lauper, and Sylvia Häusermann for their help with materials for the article; the “Psychology of Motivation, Volition, and Emotion” lab for their feedback on the work; and the editor and reviewers for their substantive and constructive comments. Parts of the manuscript have been presented at conferences as talks (15th Conference of the Swiss Psychological Society, 2017, Lausanne, Switzerland; 10th Anniversary Meeting of the Society for the Study of Motivation, 2017, Boston, MA, USA; 36th Colloquium of Motivational Psychology, 2016, Erlangen, Germany) and poster presentations (LIFE Fall Academy 2017, Zurich, Switzerland; 18th Annual Convention of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, 2017, San Antonio, TX, USA; 50th Congress of the German Psychological Association, 2016, Leipzig, Germany; 17th Annual Convention of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, 2016, San Diego, CA).

Data availability

The data (and analyses codes) are available upon request only, because our informed consents at the time of data collection did not inform participants about the possibility of making the data public.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation under Grant number 100019_156516. The funder was not involved in how we carried out our research, neither in study design; nor in the collection, analysis and interpretation of data; nor in the writing of the report; nor in the decision to submit the article for publication.