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

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.