Developing Act Frequency Measures of Organizational Behaviors.

What's loyalty?

“…In particular, the acts that were best able to differentiate were those that were in the top quartile of the Cooper et al (1990) prototypicality study, that is, the most prototypical loyalty acts. Of the 10 most prototypical acts, all are clearly active in nature (and three comprised the active loyalty measure in Study 1) and all differentiated between high-and low-loyalty target persons (Table III).…”

“…This distinction was first raised by Farrell (1983) in categorizing the exit, voice, loyalty, and neglect responses, but it may also prove useful in interpreting loyalty. The distinction between active and passive is also evident when the items studied by Cooper et al (1990) are examined. That is, a key difference between the prototypical loyalty items and the Farrell loyalty items is that the former are active while the latter are passive.…”

“…Further details on all but the last measure can be found in Withey and Cooper (1989); further details on the last measure can be found in Cooper et al (1990).…”

“…The measure of active loyalty was based on Cooper et al (1990). A description of the variables follows.…”

“…The measurement problem has been described by Cooper, Dyke, and Kay (1990) in terms of construct validity: loyalty has been operationalized in ways that do not match the loyalty construct. While loyalty is defined as supporting the organization, items used to measure loyalty are too narrow and do not conform to most people's notion of support.…”