Measuring employees’ perception in small and medium-sized enterprises: A self-assessment scale

Abstract

This paper describes a self-assessment scale, the Employee Perception Scale (EPS), and investigates its reliability and validity for measuring employees’ perception towards the continual improvement in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Empirical data were collected from 635 employees of 110 SMEs in manufacturing sectors in Trinidad and Tobago. With the aid of statistical software (i.e. the SPSS and LISREL), the inter-item reliability, and construct and content validities of the scale were examined. Results showed that the EPS is a reliable and valid tool in measuring the employees’ perception on quality performance improvement in SMEs. The paper contributes to developing self-assessment scale in measuring employees’ perceptions. It is anticipated that the findings would provide practical insights for practitioners to adopt the scale for measuring employees’ perceptions in SMEs.

Keywords:

• employees’ perception
• SMEs
• validity
• reliability