Warr, T, Cook, P y Wall, K 1979 Scales for the measurement of some work attitudes and aspects of psychological wellbeing

Journal of Occupational Psychology, 1979, 52, 129-148. Printed in Great Britain

Scales for the measurement of some work attitudes and aspects of psychological well-being PETER WARR, JOHN COOK and TOBY WALL MRC Social and Applied Psychology Unit, University of Sheffield Two studies of male manual workers are described, in which eight scales relevant to the quality of working life are introduced and assessed. The scales build upon previous work, but are designed to remedy certain conceptual and operational deficiencies. They cover work involvement, intrinsic job motivation, higher order need strength, perceived intrinsic job characteristics, job satisfaction, life satisfaction, happiness, and self-rated anxiety. In addition, components of job satisfaction and life satisfaction, derived through cluster analyses, are also identified. The scales are shown to have good internal reliability and to be factorially separate. Comprehensive psychometric data are provided as a base-line for future applications.

Adequate measurement of complex psychological states usually requires an iterative process; researchers must move several times between conceptualization and operationalization, adjusting their ideas and measures as they go. This is not always feasible within the span of a single research project, and it is sometimes necessary to accept or adapt a previously reported measure or to create a new scale with only limited opportunity for systematic development. Neither approach is entirely satisfactory, especially as most investigators have understandably given priority in their reports to substantive research questions rather than to the provision of detailed information about samples, means, variances, intercorrelations and other features which would assist in subsequent assessment of their measures. This problem is particularly evident in studies of the quality of working life and occupational well-being. The need to examine a large number of subjective variables has often led investigators to devise their own items or to select from previous measures small segments with unknown psychometric properties. An additional difficulty arises from the complexity and ill-defined scope of many concepts in the area; questionnaire items are sometimes difiicult to comprehend, especially for blue-collar workers who are typically the focus of research. There is thus a need for development work to create robust instruments in the quality of working hfe area. Of particular value would be short scales which are easily completed by unsophisticated respondents, which are known to be psychometrically acceptable, and for which normative data are available. This paper contributes towards meeting this need by presenting eight separate scales for diagnostic and evaluative use in both research and practice. These measure work involvement, 129 0305-8107/79/0602-0129502.00/0 © 1979 The British Psychological Society

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intrinsic job motivation, higher order need strength, perceived intrinsic job characteristics, job satisfaction, life satisfaction, happiness and self-rated anxiety. The concepts in question have all been important in previous research, and earlier studies will be described next. However, one terminological feature should first be noted. We have used 'job' to refer to the tasks undertaken in a particular setting, whereas 'work' is taken to cover jobs more generally. In this way, for example, 'job motivation' refers to a person's motivation in his or her current post, whereas 'work involvement' deals with involvement in jobs in general. This distinction between job and work has not always been drawn in the literature, with some consequential confusion. WORK INVOLVEMENT AND INTRINSIC JOB MOTIVATION Work involvement may be viewed as a component of the 'protestant work ethic' (e.g. Blood, 1969; WoUack et al., 1971). It emerged as a measurable concept from the paper by Lodahl & Kejner (1965), who presented both a 20-item scale (with 'at least three dimensions') and a more homogeneous version of six items. Subsequent research has indicated statistically significant positive relationships between their measures and age (e.g. Jones et al., 1975), reported participation in decision-making (e.g. Siegel & Ruh, 1973), internality on Rotter's (1966) locus of control scale (Runyon, 1973), endorsement of the protestant ethic (Saal, 1978), and aspects of job satisfaction, especially satisfaction with intrinsic features of a job (e.g. Weissenberg & Gruenfeld, 1968). Gechman & Wiener (1975) have reported a significant correlation with amount of voluntary unpaid overtime; and Warr & Lovatt (1977), using a simple two-item scale, found a significant association with speed of obtaining a new job after redundancy. Involvement is usually found to be unrelated to job performance (see the review by Rabinowitz & Hall, 1977), although there is a suggestion from Pelz & Andrews' (1976) results that among scientists involvement and performance are significantly interrelated (rs mostly between 0-20 and 0-30 in their study of nine samples with n ranging between 65 and 401). This pattern is consistent with other findings that attitudes and job performance are more likely to be associated among managerial and professional employees, who have greater personal opportunity to shape their own job activities than have many manual workers (Warr, 1978c). However, there are still reasons for dissatisfaction with the concept and measures as employed so far (e.g. Lawler & Hall, 1970). The focus of the Lodahl & Kejner items is mainly upon a person's present job (indeed they used the term 'job' involvement), whereas their definition was more in terms of work in general. Second, this definition was itself uncertain. On the one hand, the authors were interested in 'the intemalization of values about the goodness of work or the importance of work in the worth of the person' (p. 24). We view this as the extent to which a person wants to be engaged in work, and take that as our basic definition of work involvement. Lodahl & Kejner's second definition was 'the degree to which a person's work performance affects his self-esteem' (p. 25). This is rather different, being concerned principally with a person's present job and the extent to which he wants to perform well in that job. We prefer to treat this separate notion as intrinsic Job motivation. The term ' intrinsic' is used to emphasize that the motivation is towards personal achievement and task success rather than towards 'extrinsic' satisfactions arising from features

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such as additional pay or good working conditions. Illustrative items from Lodahl & Kejner's six-item scale are: 'most things in life are more important than work' (a negatively scored statement of work involvement), and 'I'm really a perfectionist about my j o b ' (representing what is here termed 'intrinsic job motivation'). This latter concept is akin to Lawler's (1969) 'intrinsic motivation', defined as 'the degree to which a job holder is motivated to perform well because of some subjective rewards or feelings that he expects to receive or experience as a result of performing well'. Lawler & Hall (1970) tapped intrinsic motivation through items such as ' I feel a great sense of personal satisfaction when I do my job well', and statements of this kind make up the 'internal work motivation' scale of Hackman & Oldham (1975, 1976). Scores on that scale have been found to be significantly positively associated with aspects of job satisfaction and certain perceived job characteristics such as responsibility and knowledge of results (e.g. Hackman & Oldham, 1975; Oldham et al., 1976; Wall et al, 1978). The last-named authors also report a statistically significant relationship (/•=0-41) with employee mental health, measured by the General Health Questionnaire (Goldberg, 1972).

HIGHER ORDER NEED STRENGTH AND PERCEIVED INTRINSIC JOB CHARACTERISTICS Another feature which has attracted recent attention is employees' need for satisfaction and achievement through skilled and autonomous work. The intensity of this need has been variously labelled 'growth need strength' (Hackman & Oldham, 1975), 'self-actualization need strength' (Sims & Szilagyi, 1976) and 'higher order need strength' (Hackman & Lawler, 1971). We will use the last of these terms, recognizing its derivation from Maslow's (1970) hierarchical theory. Higher order need strength has some conceptual similarity with intrinsic job motivation, but as defined here the latter refers only to a specific job situation whereas higher order need strength is viewed as a dispositional characteristic extending across jobs. Measurement of this characteristic has typically been through the items provided by Hackman & Oldham (1975). These include 'would like' ratings of, for example, ' opportunities for personal growth and development in my job' and forced-choice preference responses between items like 'a job for which the pay is good' and 'a job with considerable opportunity to be creative and innovative'. We have found that the content and complexity of these items present difficulties and that a more comprehensible scale is particularly required for blue-collar respondents. Another component of Hackman & Oldham's general model is the extent to which certain 'work motivating factors' are involved in a job. These are frequently measured in terms of ratings of the presence of job variety, autonomy, task identity, task significance and feedback to the worker (see also Hackman & Lawler, 1971), and positive associations between their presence and overall job satisfaction have been summarized by Wall (1978). However, the five factors often turn out to be moderately intercorrelated (median interfactor values of 0-52, 0-20 and 0-42 are reported by Dunham, 1976, Steers & Spencer, 1977 and Saal, 1978, respectively), and it would be useful to obtain standardization data for a brief single measure of the presence of job characteristics which might give rise to intrinsic satisfaction. We will refer to this as a scale oi perceived intrinsic job characteristics.

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Studies ofjob satisfaction have taken many different forms since the original work of Hoppock (1935). Some investigators have preferred to obtain overall satisfaction scores, either through single items (e.g. Quinn et al., 1974) or through aggregates of several items (e.g. Brayfield «fe Rothe, 1951). Other researchers have used instruments specially constructed to tap a number of different features of satisfaction. For example, the Job Description Index (Smith et al., 1969) contains subscales to measure attitudes towards pay, promotion prospects, the work itself, supervision, and co-workers. The Worker Opinion Survey (Cross, 1973) has in addition a subscale to tap feelings about the firm as a whole, and a similar instrument for use with managers also covers attitudes towards subordinates (Warr & Routledge, 1969). These measures have a number of disadvantages. They tend to contain redundant and overlapping items and are rather long and cumbersome. Their emphasis has been primarily upon extrinsic features of satisfaction, to the relative exclusion of intrinsic components. Furthermore, they sometimes confuse descriptive and evaluative judgements, although it is only the latter which can be said genuinely to measure satisfaction (e.g. Payne ef a/., 1976). LIFE SATISFACTION, HAPPINESS AND SELF-RATED ANXIETY Psychological well-being is a diffuse concept which deserves greater measurement attention (e.g. Bradburn, 1969; Warr & Wall, 1975). One set of investigations has examined the nature and correlates of life satisfaction, usually construing this in terms of people's expressed satisfaction with features of their environment and everyday life. Studies from a 'social indicators' perspective have examined national survey samples' ratings of a wide range of features (your car, your house, your sleep, your freedom of speech, etc.) (e.g. Andrews & Withey, 1974, 1976; Hall, 1976a). Some research has given emphasis to the interrelationships between life satisfaction and other features of psychological well-being and mental health (e.g. Bradburn, 1969; Warr, 1978i); and other studies have looked at both life satisfaction and job satisfaction. For example. Hall (1976ft) reported an intercorrelation of 0-42 in a British sample; and in an American study London et al. (1977) observed a median correlation of 0-21 between single job satisfaction items and an overall life satisfaction measure. These latter authors also observed that job satisfaction contributed more to life satisfaction for men than for women, a finding which echoes Hulin's (1969) observation. A measure which has often been employed in national surveys (e.g. Quinn & Shepard, 1974) is an expression of personal happiness on a three-point scale. This provides another perspective on well-being and in view of its simplicity and the availability of comparison data is often worth recording. Research into anxiety has traditionally been directed towards measures of trait anxiety, neuroticism, etc., and there is a need for short indices of self-rated anxiety. A number of possibilities have been examined by Bradburn (1969), Warr (1978ft) and others, but (as with life satisfaction) further investigations with particularly salient items are desirable. SUMMARY OF TERMS

Working definitions of the several concepts outlined above are as follows. The numbers assigned to each are employed consistently throughout the paper.

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1. Work involvement is viewed as the degree to which a person wants to be engaged in work. 2. Intrinsic job motivation is viewed as the degree to which a person wants to work well in his or her job in order to achieve intrinsic satisfaction. 3. Higher order need strength is taken to be the importance which a person attaches to the attainment of higher order needs. 4. Perceived intrinsic Job characteristics are the person's reports about the degree to which features are present in his or her job which might give rise to intrinsic satisfaction. 5. Job satisfaction is the degree to which a person reports satisfaction with intrinsic and extrinsic features of the job. Total job satisfaction is the sum of all separate items, and overall job satisfaction is reported satisfaction with the job as a whole. 6. Life satisfaction is the degree to which a person reports satisfaction with salient features of his life and life-space. Total life satisfaction is the sum of all separate items, and overall life satisfaction is reported satisfaction with one's life as a whole. 7. Happiness is the degree to which a person reports that he or she is currently happy. 8. Self-rated anxiety is the degree to which a person reports anxiety about salient features of his or her life and life-space summed across items, and overall self-rated anxiety is reported anxiety in general. Definitions of components of concepts 5 and 6 will be introduced later.

Scales to measure these eight concepts were developed through two interview studies with blue-collar workers. The initial pool of items was drawn from the literature and through discussion, and a pilot study was previously carried out to assist with initial decisions about items and procedures. Study 1 took place in February 1977 and Study 2 in November 1977. The Samples The respondents in the two principal studies were 200 and 390 blue-collar male workers within the mainland United Kingdom. They were all in full-time employment (thus excluding the self-employed), had worked in their present job for at least a month, and had a mean length of service of 9-02 years. They were aged between 20 and 64, and were all employed in manufacturing industry (orders 3 to 19 of the Standard Industrial Classification, which excludes service industries, construction, agriculture, mining and transport). Respondents were drawn in equal numbers from 10 widely dispersed sampling areas (Study 1) and 20 areas (Study 2) according to a predetermined frame which approximately matched national demographic characteristics. This specified that half the sample in each area should be from firms employing fewer than 300 employees and half from larger companies (see, for example. Department of Employment, 1978). Within each half of the sample, 50 per cent should be above and 50 per cent below 40 years of age, and within each quarter-sample half should be skilled, 30 per cent semi-skilled and 20 per cent unskilled. Decisions about skill level were made in terms of training required before a person was judged competent at his job (months or years, several weeks, or a few days respectively for the three levels of skill), and examples of jobs in each category were supplied to interviewers from the material provided by the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys (1970).

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Other biographical information was gathered during the interview, and the two samples were of almost identical composition. A combined analysis (« = 590) revealed that 13 per cent were unmarried, 24 per cent were married without children at home and 63 per cent were married with children at home. In terms of length of service with their present employer, 26 per cent reported less than 2 years, 22 per cent between 2 and 5 years, 24 per cent between 5 and 10 years, 17 per cent between 10 and 20 years, and 11 per cent more than 20 years. Nine per cent reported that their company contained no trade union members; and 'some', 'most' and 'all' company employees were reported to be trade unionists by 12, 33 and 46 per cent of respondents respectively. Procedure Interviews were concerned solely with the scales under investigation, and were carried out individually within respondents' homes by trained female staff of National Opinion Polls Ltd. Each interviewer sought volunteers to complete her quota sampling frame. The average time for each interview was about 30 minutes; in Study 2 this included other scales which are not described here. Interviewers indicated that respondents had 'very little' or ' n o ' difificulty with the material and that they generally appeared to enjoy the interview. Interviewers read out the instructions and items to each person, who selected his answer from the set of alternatives listed on a card. The interviewer then recorded the response in numerical form on the questionnaire. The Items The research design required decisions to be taken on the basis of Study 1 results so that shorter and better scales could be used in Study 2. The latter study, with a larger number of respondents, was intended to provide cross-validation evidence and to yield reliable norms for this population. In order to include additional scales in Study 2 (not reported here) the Life Satisfaction scale was omitted from this second investigation. The items finally selected and the response dimensions employed are presented in full in Appendix A; the same sequence of scales was used in both studies. It will be seen that seven-point responses were sought throughout, except for section 4 {perceived intrinsic job characteristics) where five alternative responses were employed and for the happiness item which involved a three-point response scale. Scoring was from 1 to 7, 1 to 5 or 1 to 3 throughout, with 1 being the most negative response in each case. Each scale or subscale score was the unweighted sum of the responses to the included items.

Decisions about exclusion of items in Study 1 were based upon inter-item and item-whole correlations (desired to be high within a scale), mean scores (desired to be away from the end-point), standard deviations (desired to be high), and the meaning of each item (excessive redundancy within a scale was undesirable). The final number of items in each scale is shown in Table 1. These were achieved after omission of 2, 2 and 4 items in scales 1 to 3 respectively. Scale 4 in Study 1 comprised seven items, but five additional ones were included for Study 2 in order to achieve

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more extensive coverage of intrinsic job characteristics; two of these were subsequently omitted in the light of the Study 2 results, leaving a 10-item scale. The final scales contain no negatively keyed items, although some were included in the initial battery. This group of items scaled only marginally less reliably than did the positively keyed ones, but they were excluded from Study 2 because they were reported by interviewers to present conceptual difficulties for some respondents. In addition to the eight scales already identified, it will be seen that the left-hand column of Table 1 contains several separately numbered and labelled items. Three of these (5x, 6x and 8x) are the single-item overall job satisfaction, life satisfaction and anxiety reports sohcited at the end of scales 5, 6 and 8 (see Appendix A). The other terms newly introduced in Table 1 are subscales of measures 5 and 6, derived through cluster analyses using the furthest neighbour method. The job satisfaction items (scale 5) are divided in two separate ways. At one level of analysis, two separate clusters of items (5a and 5b) could readily be identified. Seven items (numbers 5.2, 5.4, 5.6, 5.8, 5.10, 5.12, 5.14 in Appendix A) came together into a subscale which is appropriately termed intrinsic job satisfaction (5a). The other items represent extrinsic job satisfaction (5b). However, the full set of items could also be viewed at a different level in terms of three other clusters (5c, 5£/and 5e). One group of four items (5.2, 5.6, 5.8, 5.14) emerged as a cluster specially concerned -with job itself intrinsic satisfaction (labelled 5c). Another cluster of five extrinsic satisfaction items (5.1, 5.3, 5.5, 5.13, 5.15) appeared to be best described as working conditions extrinsic satisfaction (5d). The remaining items (5.4, 5.7, 5.9, 5.10, 5.11, 5.12) comprised a cluster which straddled the intrinsic and extrinsic features in a way which suggested a concern for individual recognition and management behaviour; we have interpreted this in terms of employee relations satisfaction (5e). Cluster analysis of the life satisfaction items yielded an interpretable threecomponent structure. Items 6.5, 6.6, 6.9 and 6.10 of scale 6 in Appendix A deal with immediate personal concerns about health, education, social and family life, and we have referred to this cluster as satisfaction with personal life (6a). Seven other items (6.7, 6.8, 6.11, 6.12, 6.13, 6.14, 6.15) form a cluster to do with satisfaction with standards and achievement (6b); and the third cluster of four items (6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4) covers satisfaction with life style (6c). The choice of the complete scale or subscales in any investigation will depend upon the degree of specificity which is required. The subscales are strongly intercorrelated (see Table 3), and they are of course statistically associated with the full scales of which they are part. A number of features in Table 1 deserve comment. The values presented for Study 1 are derived from the final set of items, after exclusion of less satisfactory material. They are therefore directly comparable with the Study 2 values, except for scale 4 where additional items were present in Study 2; results for the incomplete scale 4 used in Study 1 are therefore omitted from the table. In all cases the scales' internal homogeneity is good, as represented by alpha coefficients (Nunnally, 1967) and mean item-whole correlations, and these values are closely replicated across the two studies. Furthermore, the individual item-whole correlations (not shown in the table) remain very similar across the studies. The rank-order correlations between item-whole values for each item in a scale on the two occasions average around 0 95. The standard deviations remain very similar in the two studies, with the exception of scale 3 (higher order need strength), which showed a significant decrease (P< 0-001)

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from 6-80 to 5-03. This may have occurred because of the omission of four items from the original Study 1 version of this scale, generating a more homogeneous set of statements in Study 2. (Recall that the values in Table 1 cover the same items for each study.) There are small but statistically significant increases in mean scores for the first three scales from Study 1 to Study 2. These may also have arisen partly from the omission of the more divergent items; as noted above omissions were only made from these three scales. The decline in scores for scale 8 (self-rated anxiety) is not statistically significant, but is of interest in that examination of individual items revealed a large decrease in only one case, anxiety about Britain's economic future. This refiects a marked change in the economic climate between the dates of the two studies, illustrated in sample newspaper headlines like ' Food prices shock and worse to come', 'Few will escape higher bills' (February, 1977) and 'Just the job—boost from the dole queues' and 'Taxes to be cut next week' (November, 1977). It is also notable that the mean scores are located away from the end-point of the scales. It is often observed, for example, that the large majority of employees report themselves satisfied with their job (e.g. Quinn et al., 1974). Mean job satisfaction scores in the present studies are above the scale mid-point, but closer to the mid-point than to the maximum. This is also the case for life satisfaction, with the exception of subscale 6b where the mean value is below the scale mid-point; on the other hand, scales 1, 2 and 3 have relatively high means. The pattern of correlations within and between the scales was closely replicated across the two studies. This may be illustrated by the factor analysis results in Table 2. These show the varimax-rotated loadings of each item on the six scales common to both studies. (Note that the 'overall' items identified as Sx, 6x, 1 and 8x in Table 1 were not included.) In keeping with an assumed model of six independent constructs, the first six factors only were rotated in each study, these embracing 50-1 and 46-5 per cent of the accounted variance in the two cases. It can be seen that scale 1 {work involvement) straddles the first two factors in the Study 1 results, but that otherwise the factor structure is remarkably consistent with the model. Items in each scale all load highly on a separate factor, and their loadings are extremely similar in the two studies. A summary of the interrelationships between the total scale and subscale scores is presented in Table 3. This matrix derives from the combined sample of 590 respondents, except for the values associated with scale 4 {perceived intrinsic job characteristics) and scale 6 {life satisfaction). Since the final version of scale 4 contains more items than were used in Study 1, it is more appropriate to cite the correlations with the final 10-item scale observed in Study 2 (« = 390). On the other hand, as scale 6 was not used in Study 2, the values associated with this measure in Table 3 are based upon the Study 1 sample of 200 respondents. It can be seen that age is uncorrelated with other variables in the table except scale 2 {intrinsic job motivation) where r=O-ll. This contrasts with the small but significant relationships between similar variables and age which have been reported elsewhere (e.g. Saleh & Otis, 1964; Aldag & Brief, 1977; Rabinowitz & Hall, 1977; Saal, 1978). As would be expected, skill level is moderately associated (r=0-29) with scale 4 {perceived intrinsic job characteristics), and to a lesser extent with higher order need strength (r = 0-17). Correlations were also calculated with length of service, family responsibility and degree of unionization. These are not shown in Table 3, but

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