Dominant general factor in employee attitudes surveys: A practitioner’s guide.

What is it about?

Employers often administer surveys that measure the engagement and job satisfaction of their employees. These job attitude surveys are accurate measures of the overall morale of a workforce and relate to employee turnover, job performance, and other key outcomes. Typically, employee engagement and job satisfaction surveys contain multiple questions and employers try to interpret and act on the results of individual questions. This paper shows that individual questions usually describe a large general attitude dimension better than the smaller targeted dimensions that survey question writers intended to measure. This clouds the interpretation of individual questions’ results. The authors provide a step-by-step guide for analyzing and interpreting job attitude survey results in light of the presence of this large underlying general dimension. An overall recommendation is to focus interpretations on an overall score from all questions in an employee engagement and job satisfaction survey.

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