Using Single-Item Measures to Examine the Relationships between Work, Personality, and Well-Being in the Workplace

Abstract

Measuring the well-being of employees through questionnaire measures can give a useful indication of the positive or negative mental health of a workforce along with their satisfaction with their circumstances. Furthermore, measuring the antecedents of these outcomes provides a basis for reducing negative outcomes and promoting positive mental health and satisfaction within an organization. This endeavour can quickly become impractical, however, as taking into account the range of possible environmental or personal factors, can lead to a lengthy and burdensome measurement tool. The current paper examines the use of single-items for this purpose, demonstrating that single-item measures of work-related and personality factors exhibit relationships with each other and with outcomes that the literature on well-being predicts. Using multiple-regression analysis, the results show that work related factors such as control and reward provide significant predictors of well-being outcomes including job satisfaction, while personality factors such as selfesteem and self-efficacy are significant predictors of all outcome measures. Furthermore, variations in the relationships with specific outcomes and interaction effects are found. The results suggest that using single-item measures may provide a valid approach to investigating well-being in the workplace in circumstances that may require very brief scales.

An International Survey of the Wellbeing of Employees in the Business Process Outsourcing Industry

“…In other words, the survey measured both positive and negative aspects of well-being (job characteristics; appraisals; and outcomes) using single items which had been shown to correlate highly with longer scales. These single items also showed the same predictive validity as the longer scales (Williams & Smith, 2013, 2016.…”

“…This approach has been used by Williams (2012) and many of the items in the present survey were taken from the Wellbeing Process Questionnaire (WPQ). These items have been shown to be highly correlated with the longer scales from which they were derived and to show the predicted associations between job characteristics, appraisals and outcomes (Williams & Smith, 2013, 2016. In other words, the survey measured both positive and negative aspects of well-being (job characteristics; appraisals; and outcomes) using single items which had been shown to correlate highly with longer scales.…”

Positive Well-Being and Work-Life Balance among UK Railway Staff

“…The items in SWELL were derived from the Well-being Process Questionnaire (WPQ), a single-item scale. Previous re-searchers have confirmed the validity and reliability of such single-item well-being measures [8] [9] [12]. They allow for the identification of overall risk and well-being while saving time in comparison with multi-item measures.…”

The Student Well-Being Process Questionnaire (Student WPQ)

“…Recent studies of the WPQ have either used categories of variables as in the present study or have conducted factor analyses and used the factor scores in the regression (Williams, Pendlebury & Smith, 2017;Williams, Thomas & Smith, 2017). An alternative approach is to pay more attention to the individual variables (both predictors and outcomes- Williams & Smith, 2016).…”