Measuring work attitudes with less: Supervised construct scoring to shorten work attitude measures

Abstract

Work attitude and perceptions surveys are useful to understand workforces and improve employee well‐being. However, surveys are often lengthy, leading companies to use less effective methods or measure only a few constructs. Researchers have tried various scale reduction methods, including single‐item measures (Matthews et al., Journal of Business and Psychology, 2022), but these and other scale‐shortening methods often compromise content validity and reliability. This research tests a novel scale‐shortening method called supervised construct scoring (SCS) to create shorter work attitude and perception measures. Despite using only 39% of the original items, SCS scores exhibited nearly equivalent psychometric properties as full‐scale scores and superior psychometric properties when compared to single‐item measures. SCS represents a paradigm shift in scale shortening, and the new Short Work Attitude and Perception Scales (SWAPS) algorithms are made freely available: https://osf.io/9tueh/?view_only=482dc89e3cbf4c1489e28aabff307caa.