ME2 and ME4 are both reverse-worded / reverse-coded in an attempt to avoid
acquiescence bias. There is, however, no consensus on the use or non-use of
reverse-polarity items in psychometric scale design. Ray (1983), for example,
found scales including reverse-polarity items (balanced scales) to perform better
than unbalanced ones containing non-reversed items. Elsewhere, however,
Herche and Engelland (1996) found that using reversed-polarity items negatively
affected scale unidimensionality.
The target population for this research has a mixed geographic origin with 36 per
cent having a non-UK (People 1st 2011a; 2011b; 2011c). Consequently, a
significant proportion of respondents are likely to have a first language other than
English. With regard to the issue of using psychometric scales in cross-cultural
contexts (which includes language differences), (Wong et al. 2003) have found
that using reverse polarity can introduce problems with construct validity in
multivariate modelling. Based on the research above, it was decided to employ a
small number of reverse-polarity items and to monitor the performance of these
in the pilot study.
Organisational Commitment
Organisational commitment is the third employee attitude to be included as a
latent variable in this study and has been defined as '...the relative strength of an
individual's identification with and involvement in a particular organization'
(Mowday et al. 1979: 226).
The organisational commitment construct is a commonly-studied employee
attitude in organisational studies (Huelsman 2007) and was flagged as a variable
of interest during the reviews of generic and applied hospitality leadership work
(e.g. Bartkus et al. 1997; Yousef 2000; Chiang and Jang 2008; Erkutlu 2008;
Yiing and Ahmad 2009). Furthermore, the examination of the applied hospitality
literature revealed a number of studies that had included an organisational
commitment measure.
A summary of these studies is provided in Table 5 - 1.