Page 87 - Build a Culture of Employee Engagement with the Principles

58 Carrots and Sticks Don’t Work

for a common understanding and agreement of what is being
measured and how it is being measured. Without such a process,
the world would be in chaos. Just imagine if we could not agree
on how to measure an acre of land, the length of a day, an ounce
of gold, or the relative value of currencies around the world. All
science, commerce, and trade would literally stop without the
objective standards created by operational definitions.
In psychology, operational definitions are more challeng-
ing than they are in other fields because many of the phenom-
enons we investigate are not directly measurable. Our goal is to
translate, or operationalize, the conceptual definition into spe-
cific items that we hope accurately and reliably assess the con-
struct of interest. For example, if we wanted to operationalize
“employee satisfaction,” we might ask questions such as, “Do you
enjoy coming to work?” “Are you happy in your current role?”
and “Are you satisfied with your compensation?” Each of these
questions is then used in creating the assessment instrument.
When generating items that define a construct, it becomes
critical to remain tied as closely as possible to the conceptual
definition to avoid overlapping with similar constructs. The
goal is to create items that measure the entire construct and
only that construct. It is at exactly this critical point, the opera-
tionalizing of engagement, that the wheels fall off most current
research. Most often, researchers confuse and overlap items
that more appropriately belong on a motivation or satisfaction
survey rather than an engagement survey. Similarly, instead of
measuring engagement itself, researchers often assess the fac-
tors that cause engagement to occur. My intent in the following
section is to provide clarity to this issue and enable you to evalu-
ate, at least in part, whether an employee engagement instru-
ment meets criteria for construct validity.