WECT Project Measures – Weekly Surveys

Several days after the initial survey, participants began completing weekly online surveys. The survey research firm emailed participants the link to the weekly survey on Friday evening and they were instructed to complete it by Monday night at 11:59pm. Participants were given the following instructions at the start of the survey: “You will be asked questions about your emotions and experiences during the past week. By past week, we mean the previous 7 days.” They were then reminded that all information collected in the survey would be kept completely confidential and secure, and only the research team has access to the data.

Each of the 12 weekly surveys was identical. The only exception was that the week 4 survey asked participants to provide the name and email address of a co-worker who would be willing to complete an online survey about the participant and their organization.

The weekly surveys began by asking participants about the emotions they experienced during the past week using two established measures: the PANAS (Watson & Tellegen, 1988) and the CES-D short form (Edwards et al., 2010). The PANAS and the CES-D were presented in a randomized order for each participant and the order of the items within each scale were randomized for each participant.

Weekly Survey – Emotion Section

• Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS)[additional emotion words were added to the PANAS list]
  • Watson, D., Clark, L.A. & Tellegen, A. (1988). Development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative affect: The PANAS scales. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54, 1063-1070.

• Center for Epidemiological Studies-Depression Scale (CES-D) – short form (15 items)
• Original scale:
• Radloff, L. (1977). The CES-D scale: A self-report depression scale for research in the general population. Applied Psychological Measurement, 1, 385-401
• Short Form:
• Edwards, M.C., Cheavens, J. S., Heiy, J. E., & Cukrowicz, K. C. (2010). A reexamination of the factor structure of the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale: Is a one-factor model plausible? Psychological Assessment, 22(3), 711-715. doi: 10.1037/a0019917

Weekly Survey – Job Section

Participants then completed a job section. It began by asking participants if their employment situation changed during the past week. If they indicated that it had, they were asked to describe the changes. Participants who were no longer employed full-time were not eligible to participate in the study any longer.

Next, came the weekly job satisfaction scale.

• Job satisfaction – weekly
  • Cammann, C., Fichman, M., Jenkins, G. D., & Klesh, J.R. (1983). Assessing the attitudes and perceptions of organizational members. In S. E. Seashore, E. E. Lawler, P. H. Mirvis & C. Cammann (Eds.), Assessing organizational change: A guide to methods, measures, and practices (pp. 71-138). New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Following job satisfaction, participants reported:

• Number of hours worked during the past week
• Number of hours of sleep on average work and non-work nights during the past week
• Intention to turnover – weekly: whether they had actively looked for a new job during the past week (yes or no)

After these items, participants were presented with a variety of scales that asked about their experiences at their job during the past week. The order in which the scales were presented and the order of the items within each scale were randomized for each participant. The instructions and response options for each of these scales was modified from their original form to refer to the past week at work.

• Counterproductive Work Behavior Checklist-32 items (CWB-C-32) – weekly
  • Spector, P., Fox, S., Penney, L., Bruursema, K., Goh, A., & Kessler, S. (2006). The dimensionality of counterproductivity: Are all counterproductive behaviors created equal? Journal of Vocational Behavior, 68(3), 446-460.
  • Available: http://shell.cas.usf.edu/~pspector/scales/cwbcpage.html

• Organizational Citizenship Behavior Checklist-20 items (OCB-C-20) - weekly
  • Fox, S, Spector, P., Goh, A., Bruursema, K., & Kessler, S. (2011). The deviant citizen: Measuring potential positive relations between counterproductive work behaviour and organizational citizenship behavior. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology.
  • Available: http://shell.cas.usf.edu/~pspector/scales/ocbcpage.html

• Work Intensity Scale - weekly
  • Brown, S. P., & Leigh, T. W. (1996). A new look at psychological climate and its relationships to job involvement, effort, and performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 81, 358–368.

• State Work Engagement Scale – weekly
  • Breevaart, K., Bakker, A. B., Demerouti, E., Hetland, J. (2012). The measurement of state work engagement: A multilevel factor analytic study. European Journal of Psychological Assessment. doi: 10.1027/1015-5759/a000111

          State measure adapted from Utrecht Work Engagement Scale:

  • Schaufeli, W.B., Bakker, A.B., & Salanova, M. (2006). The measurement of work engagement with a short questionnaire: A cross-national study. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 66, 701-716. doi: 10.1177/0013164405282471.
  • Available: http://wilmarschaufeli.nl/wp/downloads/test-manuals/

• Organizational Justice Scale - weekly [6 interactional justice items only]
  • Moorman, Blakely, & Niehoff (1998). Does perceived organizational support mediate the relationship between procedural justice and organizational citizenship behaviors. Academy of Management Journal, 41, 351-357.

• Discussion Conflict Scale - weekly[low intensity discussion conflict items only]
  • Behfar, K., Bendersky, C., Weingart, L. R., Bear, J., Todorova, G., & Jehn, K. (2012, in preparation). Measuring the Intensity of Interpersonal Conflict. In N. Ashkanasy, O. Ayolo, & K. Jehn, (Eds.) The Handbook of Research in Conflict Management. Edward Edgar Publishing, UK.

• Interpersonal Conflict at Work Scale (ICAWS) – weekly
  • Spector, P. E., & Jex, S. M. (1998). Development of four self-report measures of job stressors and strain: Interpersonal Conflict at Work Scale, Organizational Constraints Scale, Quantitative Workload Inventory, and Physical Symptoms Inventory. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 3, 356–367.
  • Available: http://shell.cas.usf.edu/~pspector/scales/strspage.html

• Workplace Ostracism Scale (WOS) – weekly
  • Ferris, D. L., Brown, D. J., Berry, J. W., & Lian, H. (2008). The development and validation of the Workplace Ostracism Scale. Journal of Applied Psychology, 93(6), 1348-1366.

• Abusive Supervision – weekly
  • Tepper, B. J. 2000. Consequences of abusive supervision. Academy of Management Journal, 43: 178-190.

• Revised Everyday Discrimination Scale at Work (R-EDS-Work) – weekly
  • Stucky, B., Gottfredson, N. C., Panter, A. T., Daye, C. E., Allen, W. R., & Wightman, L. F. (2011). An item response theory-based revision of the Everyday Discrimination Scale. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, 17(2), 175-185. doi: 10.1037/a0023356

• Comments: The survey ended with an open-ended question asking participants whether they had any questions or comments about the research project.