Development and Initial Validation of the Need Satisfaction and Need Support at Work Scales: A Validity-Focused Approach

Abstract

Although the relevance of employee need satisfaction and manager need support have been examined, the integration of self-determination theory (SDT) into work and organizational psychology has been hampered by the lack of validated measures. The purpose of the current study was to develop and validate measures of employees' perception of need satisfaction (NSa-WS) and need support (NSu-WS) at work that were grounded in SDT. We used three Swedish samples (total N = 1,430) to develop and validate our scales. We used a confirmatory approach including expert panels to assess item content relevance, confirmatory factor analysis for factorial validity, and associations with theoretically warranted outcomes to assess criterion-related validity. Scale reliability was also assessed. We found evidence of content, factorial, and criterion-related validity of our two scales of need satisfaction and need support at work. Further, the scales demonstrated high internal consistency. Our newly developed scales may be used in research and practice to further our understanding regarding how satisfaction and support of employee basic needs influence employee motivation, performance, and well-being. Our study makes a contribution to the current literature by providing (1) scales that are specifically designed for the work context, (2) an example of how expert panels can be used to assess content validity, and (3) testing of theoretically derived hypotheses that, although SDT is built on them, have not been examined before.

A Self-Determination Theory Perspective on Transfer of Leadership Training: The Role of Leader Motivation

“…We measured transfer of training in terms of employees' perceived changes in managers' need support after training. Need support was assessed with the 12-item Need Support at Work Scale (Tafvelin & Stenling, 2018) at Time 1, Time 3, and Time 4. This instrument consists of three dimensions that capture employees' perceptions of their managers' autonomy support (four items), competence support (four items), and relatedness support (four items).…”

The Basic Psychological Need Satisfaction and Need Frustration at Work Scale: A Validation Study

“…More recent work has employed the Work-Related Basic Need Satisfaction Scale developed by Van den Broeck et al (2010). While the Van den Broeck et al (2010) scale has been argued to provide a better operationalization of basic psychological need satisfaction in the workplace because it followed traditional validation processes, past research has noted problems with this scale as well (Olafsen et al, 2015;Tafvelin and Stenling, 2018). In particular, with the introduction of need frustration, it can be argued that some of the reversed score items might tap into need frustration rather than need satisfaction.…”

Leadership Training to Increase Need Satisfaction at Work: A Quasi-Experimental Mixed Method Study

“…Need support was assessed with the 12-item Need Support at Work Scale (Tafvelin and Stenling, 2018). This instrument consists of three subscales that capture managers’ perceptions of their autonomy support (four items), competence support (four items), and relatedness support (four items) toward their employees.…”

“…Need satisfaction was measured with the 13-item Need Satisfaction at Work Scale (Tafvelin and Stenling, 2018). This instrument consists of three subscales that are designed to measure the satisfaction of the need for autonomy (four items), the need for competence (four items), and the need for relatedness (five items) in work contexts.…”