The Development and Validation of an Ideal Point Measure of Work Engagement

Work engagement has been an extremely popular area of research and practice over the past two decades. However, organizational scholars have yet to consider potentially more appropriate ways of modeling how individuals report their work engagement and, relatedly, of measuring it. This article seeks to (1) establish that individuals use an ideal point (vs. dominance) process to respond to work engagement items, (2) develop a construct valid work engagement scale with good psychometric properties using the ideal point framework, and (3) demonstrate the potential advantages that our ideal point scales can offer over existing dominance scales for work engagement research and practice. These goals were accomplished using a multi-phase approach. In Phase 1 we constructed a new ideal point work engagement scale (the IPWES), a short form (the IPWES–SF), and a dominance-style scale for comparisons (the DWES). In Phase 2, the psychometric performance of the IPWES was compared with that of the DWES and existing work engagement scales. Consistent with theory, the IPWES exhibited better fit, a more equal distribution of test information across the latent continuum, and different latent estimates towards the positive and negative ends of the continuum. Finally, Phase 3 established the construct validity of the IPWES and demonstrated its utility for uncovering curvilinear relationships with correlates of engagement over existing dominance-based scales. Notably, our findings were replicated with the IPWES–SF, supporting the use of the short version even in the study of complex relationships.