Technological work environment: instrument development and measurement

ABSTRACT

The workplace environment can be represented by physical, psychosocial, and technological environment scales. Whilst there are established measurement scales for the physical and social environments in existing literature, there has been a lack of development regarding the appropriate operationalisation and measurement of the technological environment. Given this, the present study develops parsimonious measures for the technological work environment by employing a mixed method approach. This includes generating domains and items from a qualitative content analysis through focus group interviews, establishing the face and content validity of the instrument through consulting experts in the area, evaluating the construct validity by performing exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis on data collected from information technology professionals. The study further calculated floor and ceiling effects and test-retest reliability. This study suggests that the technological work environment be measured in three main dimensions, which include connectivity and network and availability of appropriate cutting-edge devices and software applications. The instrument developed can be used by other researchers in conducting future empirical studies in this area. Industry practitioners can also use the instrument in analyzing how well they have satisfied the employees in providing a technologically conducive workplace environment.

KEYWORDS:

• Technological work environment
• instrument development
• focus group
• expert feedback
• exploratory factor analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).