Development and Validation of the Work Effort Scale Rein De Cooman, Sara De Gieter, Roland Pepermans, Marc Jegers, and Frederik Van Acker Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium Abstract. In the current article, the development and validation of the Work Effort Scale (WESC), a self-report 10-item scale, is described. Data from several samples are used. The three-factor structure (persistence, direction, and intensity) of the WESC is confirmed by confirmatory factor analysis and reliability is well documented. In accordance with our expectations, we found positive correlations between self-rated performance and global job satisfaction scales and work effort. Keywords: work effort, reliability, validity, performance, job satisfaction Introduction Motivating workers and eliciting effort is considered the job of a manager, making it an important issue in I/O psy- chology. In the literature, effort appears in several theoret- ical frameworks (e.g., motivation theories, the ERI model, attribution theory, equity theory, goal-setting theory, and expectancy theory), but none of these theories conceptual- izes the concept of effort itself. This results in a jumble of meanings, definitions, and operationalizations. Conceptu- ally, effort has often been confounded with or considered equivalent to motivation. Several scholars (e.g., Bandura & Cervone, 1986; Patchen, 1970) defined motivation as the level of effort expended in work-related tasks. Neverthe- less, we agree with Brown and Peterson (1994) that clearer and more useful definitions discriminate between motiva- tion and effort, identifying the former as an antecedent of the latter. For example, many years ago Parsons (1968) de- fined effort as the means by which motivation is translated into accomplished work, implying that it can be seen as a mediator between the unobservable psychological state of motivation and work outcomes. More recently, Naylor, Pritchard, and Ilgen (1980) as well as Ilgen and Klein (1989) stated that motivation is the psychological state or predisposition of the individual with respect to choices of behavior, whereas effort is defined as the amount of energy spent on an act per unit of time. In line with this literature, motivation and effort are considered as conceptually dis- tinct here. Effort is a measurable behavior that is impacted by motivation (Bandura & Cervone, 1986; Deci & Ryan, 1985; Locke, Shaw, Saari, & Latham, 1981). Within the scope of IO psychology, we are especially interested in work-related effort, meaning all sorts of behavior that is beneficial to the organization, including behavior that is required by one’s formal duties in the job and behavior that is voluntary. According to our reasoning, work effort is sit- uated between actual motivation and performance. As Green and McIntosh (2001) already noted, the con- cept of work effort is seldom noted in empirical work ow- ing to the problem of its measurement. Macey and Schnei- der (2008) still observed that ’effort has been an elusive and ill-defined construct in the literature’ (p. 14). An ex- tensive search of the literature indicated the lack of a gen- erally accepted measure of work effort that assesses various effort dimensions and considers it as different from perfor- mance. Therefore, in the current study we developed and tested an instrument to measure employees’ work effort. A number of studies have operationalized work effort as the amount of resources that are expended on the job (e.g., Yeo & Neal, 2004). Although these authors equate high levels of effort with simply working hard, several theoretical def- initions are much broader. According to Locke et al. (1981) it is useful to distinguish three subdimensions: direction, amplitude, and duration of the action. Later, Campbell (1990) implicitly referred to three related choices an em- ployee makes, namely the choice to perform at some level of effort for some specified time, and Kanfer (1990) con- tinued with this idea on the three dimensions as critical components of motivational outcomes: what a person does (direction), how hard a person works (intensity), and how long a person works (persistence). This may, then, give an observable performance output. Nonetheless, in 1983 Campbell and Pritchard only quoted the duration of time spent working and the intensity of the work activity as im- portant aspects of work effort. Later, Campbell (1990) dif- ferentiated again between what to expend effort on, the lev- el of effort to expend, and the persistence in the expenditure of that level of effort. Furthermore, Kanfer (1990) and Locke and Latham (1990) also used this differentiation be- DOI 10.1027/1015-5759.25.4.266 European Journal of Psychological Assessment 2009; Vol. 25(4):266–273 © 2009 Hogrefe Publishing