Validation of the Procrastination at Work Scale

Abstract

Abstract. Procrastination at work has been examined relatively scarcely, partly due to the lack of a globally validated and context-specific workplace procrastination scale. This study investigates the psychometric characteristics of the Procrastination at Work Scale (PAWS) among 1,028 office employees from seven countries, namely, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Finland, Slovenia, Turkey, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom. Specifically, it was aimed to test the measurement invariance of the PAWS and explore its discriminant validity by examining its relationships with work engagement and performance. Multi-group confirmatory factor analysis shows that the basic factor structure and item loadings of the PAWS are invariant across countries. Furthermore, the two subdimensions of procrastination at work exhibited different patterns of relationships with work engagement and performance. Whereas soldiering was negatively related to work engagement and task performance, cyberslacking was unrelated to engagement and performance. These results indicate further validity evidence for the PAWS and the psychometric characteristics show invariance across various countries/languages. Moreover, workplace procrastination, especially soldiering, is a problematic behavior that shows negative links with work engagement and performance.

Validation of the Chinese Version of the Procrastination at Work Scale

“…Consistent with Metin et al (2016) and Metin et al, 2019) original studies, we expected the factors would be correlated to form an overall Procrastination at Work Scale, so we selected an oblique rotation (direct rotation; Fabrigar et al, 1999) in IBM SPSS V26 (Costello and Osborne, 2005).…”

“…For convergent validity, the focal construct should be empirically relayed to theoretically linked constructs such that it retains its uniqueness but reflects the underlying similarities with those related constructs (Campbell and Fiske, 1959). The PAWS is theoretically related to work engagement and counterproductive work behavior (Metin et al, 2016(Metin et al, , 2019; therefore, we expected measures of work engagement and counterproductive work behavior to correlate significantly with the PAWS. We also checked that the AVE values for the PAWS were higher than 0.50.…”

“…To further test the validity of our measure, we calculated the Average Variance Extracted (AVE) values for the PAWS (Fornell and Larcker, 1981;Toro-Arias et al, 2021) and compared the square root of the AVE score with its correlations with other constructs. We also checked expected associations with occupational/career concepts (work engagement, counterproductive work behavior, task performance, workplace well-being, and organizational commitment), consistent with the original scale development study (Metin et al, 2016(Metin et al, , 2019. During this stage, we also tested the measurement invariance of the PAWS using multigroup CFA across gender, age, education, and job position.…”

“…Researchers have found that procrastination, a common behavior, exists in academic, life, and work domains (Klingsieck, 2013b). More than 70% of students engage in procrastination (Schouwenburg, 1995), and more than 20% of university students thought procrastination to be a very serious problem with negative effects on their learning engagement and academic performance (Kim and Seo, 2015;Metin et al, 2019).…”

“…The two-factor PAWS has been translated and validated in Dutch, Slovenian, Croatian, Czech, Turkish, Finnish, English, and Ukrainian (Metin et al, 2016(Metin et al, , 2019. Measurement invariance was tested across culture groups in previous studies, however, was not tested across groups by gender, age, education, and job position.…”