The Quality of Work Life Scale: Validity Evidence from Brazil and Portugal
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The Quality of Work Life Scale: Validity Evidence from Brazil and Portugal Jorge Sinval 1,2
& M.
Joseph Sirgy 3
& Dong-Jin
Lee 4
& João
Marôco 1
Received: 7 September 2018 / Accepted: 17 April 2019/ # The International Society for Quality-of-Life Studies (ISQOLS) and Springer Nature B.V. 2019
Abstract Quality of work life (QWL) is an important construct, based on satisfaction of worker’s needs. It is strongly related to higher work engagement and lower burnout. To properly establish comparisons between countries’ QWL with a psychometric instrument, the measure must show validity evidence, namely in terms of measurement invariance. This study aims to assess the validity evidence of the Quality of Work Life Scale (QWLS) by examining the internal structure of the measure (i.e., dimensionality, reliability, and measurement invariance) and its relations with other variables such as burnout and work engagement. The measure was tested using a total sample of 1163 workers, 566 workers from Portugal, and 597 from Brazil. The data had a good fit to the QWLS second-order model and good reliability estimates for the two countries. Full-uniqueness measurement invariance was achieved for data for Portugal and Brazil and for gender too. The measure also demonstrated good nomological validity evidence by successfully predicting burnout and work engagement. Keywords Quality of work life . Quality of work life scale . Brazil . Portugal . Measurement
invariance There are several definitions of quality of work life (QWL; Martel and Dupuis 2006). Quality of work life (QWL), or “quality of work” as others prefer to call it (Lau and
* João Marôco [email protected]
1
William James Center for Research, ISPA - Instituto Universitário, Rua Jardim do Tabaco, 34, 1149-041 Lisbon, Portugal
2
Business Research Unit (BRU-IUL), Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), Avenida das Forças Armadas, 1649-026 Lisbon, Portugal
3
Pamplin College of Business, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, 880 West Campus Drive (Office: 2025 Pamplin Hall), Blacksburg, Virginia 24061-0236, USA
4
Department of Marketing, Yonsei University, Yonsei-ro 59, Seodaemun-gu, 03722 Seoul, Republic of Korea
J. Sinval et al.
May 1998; Louis 1998), refers to satisfaction of various needs at work (Efraty and Sirgy 1990; Sirgy et al. 2001). That is, QWL is high when the worker perceives that his various basic and growth needs are met through the employing organization. Sirgy et al. (2001) theorized that QWL involves workers’ satisfaction of basic and growth needs (i.e., lower-order and higher-order needs based on Maslow framework). The lower-order needs include health and safety needs (i.e., protection from injury at work and outside of work, as well as job-related health benefits), and economic and family needs (i.e., adequate wages, job security, having time from work to attend family needs). Higher-order needs include social needs (i.e., leisure time off work and social interactions at work), esteem needs (i.e., recognition of job performa
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