Assessing Measurement Equivalence of the KEYS(R) Climate for Creativity Scale Across Managerial Levels.
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Date
2007-06-24
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Abstract
Employee creativity has been receiving increasing attention from organizations that wish to differentiate themselves in today's competitive global marketplace (Cummings & Oldham, 1997). An important element that can serve to either enable or hinder employee creativity is employees' perceptions of how conducive their work environment is to being creative, or what has been termed the organization's climate for creativity (Amabile, Conti, Coon, Lazenby, & Herron, 1996). Because organization members' perceptions of the work environment serve as the basis for the climate for creativity, perceptual differences can have important implications for organizations that are striving to enable employee creativity. Recent research by Kwaśniewska and Nęcka (2004) found that employee perceptions of climate for creativity, as measured by the Barriers for Creativity in the Workplace Questionnaire (BCWQ), were significantly affected by managerial status. However, the BCWQ was never confirmed to display measurement equivalence, and therefore the authors' findings may not be interpretable as the group differences could be the result of measurement artifacts (Horn & McArdle, 1992; Reise, Widaman, & Pugh, 1993; Vandenberg, 2002). The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the climate for creativity, as measured by the KEYS®: Assessing the Climate for Creativity Scale (Amabile, Conti, Coon, Lazenby, & Herron, 1996), displayed measurement equivalence across three distinct managerial levels including supervisors (N = 2,100), middle managers (N = 15,829), and executives (N = 2, 960). Both confirmatory factor analyses (CFA), and the differential functioning of items and tests (DFIT; Raju, van der Linden, & Fleer, 1995), which is based on item response theory (IRT), were used to assess measurement equivalence in this study. Using the eight factor structure proposed by Rosenberg and Craig (2006), both the CFA and IRT analyses found that the KEYS scale displayed measurement equivalence across all managerial levels. Specifically, the CFA analyses found that the full 78 item KEYS scale displayed configural, metric, and scalar equivalence across all comparison groups. Additionally, two DFIT indices were used to determine that there was no differential functioning found at either the item (NCDIF) or the test (DTF) level when using the full KEYS scale. Results are discussed in terms of implications for practitioners and researchers as well as directions for future research.
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KEYS, differential item functioning, measurement equivalence, creativity, climate for creativity
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Degree
MS
Discipline
Psychology
