Abstract: New strategies for attracting and retaining skilled workforce require organizations better evaluate Quality of Work Life (QWL) of their employees. They need more precise and more complete measurement instrument. Using the procedure specific to formative variables, this study employed multistage steps for investigation and analysis. The research results in a particularly comprehensive measurement index that culls four QWL dimensions (work stress, work occupy, job and career satisfaction and working conditions) from 30 items. The model has significant implications for the measurement as well as development of valid measures of QWL in Saudi Arabia and other countries with similar work environment.
INTRODUCTION
The escalating body of research and the important academic concern in Quality of Work Life (QWL) come out of the value of this concept in administrative science. QWL is fundamentally a multidimensional concept and is a manner of reasoning about people and work structure and relations (Hsu and Kernohan, 2006; Haas, 1999). It is worth noting that a measurable quality practice is essential to an effective and outcome-driven administrative process (Ibrahim, 2011). Consequently, it is imperative for organizations to assess QWL to recover organizational management, reinforce employee affiliation and diminish employees’ turnover.
Despite widespread recognition of the importance of the concept of QWL, there is a notable lack of consensus among scholars regarding its definition and measurement tools. This absence of a commonly used definition makes examining the abundant research on QWL a complicated task (Hsu and Kernohan, 2006). Yet, most researchers on QWL have so far concentrated on the drivers of the concept (Singhapakdi et al., 2015; Gillet et al., 2013) or on its outcomes (Noor and Abdullah, 2011; Narehan et al., 2014). By and large, the research that investigates QWL builds extensively upon the works of Walton (1975), Taylor (1978), Levine et al. (1984) and Brooks and Anderson (2005). However, these models can be criticized on methodological as well as psychometric grounds. In fact, some scholars affirm that efforts for building universal conceptualization of QWL may be in vain and ineffective (Lin et al., 2013; Mirkamali and Thani, 2011). Furthermore, some arguments have been advanced to prove that QWL model is associated to organizational culture and work settings (Lin et al., 2013). Therefore, to be of pragmatic value, a QWL must be either by industry or setting specific.
The premises steering this approach are anchored in the following points, (1) First, QWL research is considerably reliant on the quality of the operationalization, (2) Second, given the countries’ characteristics in addition to the cultural differences the research for universal conceptualization of QWL may be ineffective and (3) Third, the construct measurements are as important as the appraisal of substantive relations. For that reason, more willingly than using a standard methodology based on QWL measurement, the study builds up an instrument tailored to the case of Saudi environment.
The objective of the current investigation is to build a comprehensive model to measure QWL in a way that fits diverse professions in Saudi Arabia and to check its psychometric properties. The contribution of this research is twofold. First of all, the study identifies the key manifestations of QWL employees’ perception. Second is to analyze some organizational implications for using this model for evaluating perceived QWL in applied research.
CONCEPTUALIZATION OF QWL
The QWL is a multi-dimensional concept which has been defined by scholars in diverse ways showing discrepancy on its constructs as well as components (Levine et al., 1984; Mirvis and Lawler, 1984; Taylor, 1978; Walton, 1975). Some studies associate the concept of QWL with employee’s well-being (Lawler, 1982), conditions of work life (Elizur and Shye, 1990), income sufficiency, profit sharing, employee autonomy, social interaction, employee satisfaction, employee involvement, advancement and work relations (Mohan and Kanta, 2013). Walton (1975) highlighted eight dimensions of QWL, (1) Adequate and fair compensation, (2) Safe and healthy working conditions, (3) Immediate opportunity to use and develop human capacities, (4) Opportunity for continued growth and security, (5) Social integration in the work organization (6) Constitutionalism in the work organization (7) Work and total life space and (8) Social relevance of work life. Exploring the underlying structure of QWL, Taylor (1978) proposed additional items to integrate what society and employer think significant concerning QWL. As well by means of a step by step method, Levine et al. (1984) suggested seven important drivers for QWL, (1) The degree to which superiors treat employees with respect and have self-reliance in their talents, (2) Diversity in daily work schedule, (3) Challenge of work, (4) Present work leads to future work opportunities, (5) Self-esteem, (6) Extent to which life outside of work influences life at work and (7) The extent to which work accomplished by employees contributes to society.
Martel and Dupuis (2006) argued that a model of QWL consists of a complex set of organizational interventions and a type of work life by employees. According to Carayon (1997), QWL is as a complex interaction of work systematic elements including individual task, organizational factors, environment, tools and technology. On the other hand, Duyan et al. (2013) emphasized the importance of human considerations linking QWL to employee’s mental, physical, psychological and spiritual needs. Also, Newstrom and Davis (1986) pointed out to QWL as the degree to which employees can meet and satisfy their essential personal needs through work. Davis (1983) defined the QWL as the quality of interactions between employees, work environment, economic factors and technology. Similarly, Hian and Einstein (1990) argued that QWL includes such factors as employee experience, autonomous work groups, work rewarding environment and organizational involvement.
Other researchers identified the key concepts captured in QWL as reward and compensation systems; benefit sharing, employees’ growth, work relations and opportunity for better participations (Robbins, 1989; Havlovic, 1991; Wan and Chan, 2013). Sasser et al. (1997) measured the QWL by examining the feelings of employees towards work environment including job satisfaction and interpersonal interactions. Islam and Siengthai (2009) defined QWL as the favorable condition and environment of employees with regard to benefit, welfare and management attitudes. In this sense, QWL includes components related to health and wellbeing, job security, job satisfaction, competence development and the balance between work and non-work life (Rethinam and Ismail, 2007). Danna and Griffin (1999) suggested that the dimensions of QWL should be beyond intrinsic factors of pay and reward to include dimensions connected to wellbeing such as clarity of goals, appraisal, recognition and personal development. Hackman and Oldham (1976) emphasized the importance of psychological growth as an essential dimension of QWL including skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy and feedback.
The above review reveals that QWL is a broad multidimensional concept encompassing different approaches and models reflecting a large number of inter-related organizational and human dimensions (Rethinam and Ismail, 2007). Despite this complexity it can be inferred that the concept of QWL revolves around the wellbeing of employees and that its dimensions in general, include employee’s satisfaction with physical and psychological factors related to work and daily life. The QWL in this sense, reflects the interaction between employees and work environment. The perception of quality of work life can be referred to as the favorableness or unfavorableness of a job environment for people (Davis, 1983).
In Saudi Arabia, QWL research on the various professions is still in the developmental and piloting stages. Although QWL research in Saudi Arabia is very scarce, most studies focused on employees in healthcare industry and university faculty. In this context, Almalki et al. (2012) incorporated four dimensions model of QWL including work life, home life, work design, work context and work word. They found that improving these factors could lead to a higher QWL, increase retention and enhance performance and productivity. Recently, Kamel (2013) showed that the perception of work life among faculty members in Saudi Arabia were strongly affected by reward and compensation, equal opportunity for administrative grow, job security, work load and clarity of rules and procedures.
To summarize, the search for universal conceptualization of the QWL may be so effective however, the offered models have not been personalized to fit different professions in Saudi Arabia. Consequently, this analysis supposes that the dimensionality of QWL may not be similar to that of QWL in a specific service. So, the study considers it is of great interest to develop and empirically validate an instrument that assesses the QWL for different professions with appropriate cultural validity and reliability.
MATERIALS AND METHODS
The literature review has not recognized any study that operationalizes the perception of the QWL for varied professions in Saudi Arabia and accordingly, there was no previous validated scale that could be used. It was therefore considered valuable to build up a measurement instrument, in agreement with the method for scale development advocated by Anderson and Gerbing (1988) and Churchill (1979).
A list of items was generated by adapting the items of existing generic scales (Casio, 1992; Walton, 1975; Timossi et al., 2008; Kanten and Sadullah, 2012; Lin et al., 2013).
In-depth interviews to build up dimensions of quality of work life: Since the nature and the number of QWL dimensions is largely related to the countries’ specificities as well as the cultural differences as well due to the individual subjectivity of QWL, a qualitative research was performed to identify the dimensions which determine the QWL construct in Saudi Arabia. The study used in-depth interviews to allow participant to identify new items that could be significant to the investigation and was not employed in the past studies. Employees from different sectors were interviewed regarding many QWL topics: (1) How they perceive their QWL? (2) What factors that make them satisfied/unsatisfied with their work life? and (3) What tasks they take to manage or develop QWL? The convenience sample comprises people of both genders from ages 21-57.
In order to analyze the qualitative data thus collected, a content analytic method was employed. After the literature review and the qualitative research phases, 79 items collected.
Content and face validity check: The purpose of this step is to assess the content and the face validity via a team of experts and a field test (Ibrahim and Najjar, 2008). Face validity is the simple appearance that a measure is valid (Kaplan and Sacuzzo, 1993). In the present study, five academicians are consulted to judge the capacity of items to describe quality of work life and ensure that they are comprehensible to respondents. Some items were removed and others were reworded to keep away from confusion. This stage reduced the list of items to 62 (Appendix).
Data collection: Data was collected in 2014 in the Northern Borders Region (Saudi Arabia) from 241 employees representing different private and public organizations. Among the participants, 55 were female and 186 were male. Their median age was 26 years and the median working age was 4 years (range, 1-10). For answers to the statements of survey, a Likert-type metric, that is, expressions with five intervals has been used. Besides to the English format, the questionnaire was translated into Arabic using a translation and back-translation method and a committee technique.
RESULTS
Exploratory assessment of the measures: An exploratory factor analysis was conducted to identify the underlying dimensionality of QWL by exploring patterns of correlations among 62 items. Different cut off criteria were used to find out the derived dimensions, such as, item communalities percentage of variance, eigenvalues and factor loadings (Hair et al., 1998). Items with loadings under 0.4 and with loading exceeding 0.4 on more than one component were disregarded. A four factor solution with 30 items being maintained. Conspicuously, all of the Cronbach alphas were beyond the commonly accepted rule of thumb of 0.7 (Nunnally, 1978) which indicates a suitable internal consistency among items within each identified factor. Findings are presented in Table 1.
The KMO value was 0.854 and the Chi-square value of the Bartlett’s test of sphericity was 4218.471 (p<0.001). The lowest value of communalities among the 30 items was 0.47 with most being larger than 0.50. The preliminary PCA analysis exhibited a four-factor outcome, accounting for 70.67% of variance and it was acknowledged as the optimal solution.
Among the four components, the first one conserved (32.84%) of the initial information, with a first eigenvalue of 6.89 and the last accounted for 10.6% with a primary eigenvalue of 1.27. Factor 1 incorporated four items and most of those described “Stress at work”. Factor 2 contained five items chiefly concerning home-work interface; this dimension is named “Work occupy”. All items related to “Job and career satisfaction” were loaded to Factor 3. Factor 4 included principally ten items with most being relevant to “Working conditions”. The comprehensive outcomes from the PCA are depicted in Table 1.
| Table 1: | Factor loadings for the underlying dimensions of QWL in Saudi settings |
Reliability of the overall scale as well as subscales based on this model was acceptable. The Cronbach’s alpha measures for the four subscales ranged from 0.78-0.94, whereas it was 0.93 for the overall QWL scale.
Next a confirmatory model was carried out on the residual 30 items. The measurement model makes out four components and depicts the relationships among the items and their related dimensions (Fig. 1). Assessment of the fit and the modification indices shows that the present measurement model is satisfactory (χ2 (145) = 517.918, p = 0.000, GFI = 0.951, AGFI = 0.942, CFI = 0.978, RMR = 0.061, RMSEA = 0.057<0.06).
Unidimensionality and reliability: Given these results it has been evidenced that the components are unidimensional, with each indicator reflecting one and only one underlying construct (Gerbing and Anderson, 1988).
| Fig. 1: | Measurement model |
Coefficient alpha ranging from 0.78-0.94 and the composite reliability ranging from 0.70-0.93 are considered suitable (Nunnally and Bernstein, 1994).
Convergent and discriminant validity: Convergent validity can evaluated using the measurement model by bearing out whether each indicator’s estimated ML loading on the corresponding dimension is significant (Peter, 1981). As shown in Table 2 and in Fig. 2, QWL is a formative constructs. All confirmatory factor loadings surpass (0.65) and all are significant with t-values ranging from a low of 26.351 to a high of 292.14. Accordingly we have proof of convergent validity of our scales.
In addition, discriminant validity in the measurement model was assessed by examining a CFA model which included the four dimensions: “Stress at work”, “Work occupy”, "Job and career satisfaction” and “Working conditions”. The procedure suggested by Anderson and Gerbing (1988) was used. First, in this base model the paths between the four constructs were freely estimated. After that, each correlation parameters was constrained to “one” independently and the correspondent models were assessed. The Δχ2 values between the constrained models and the unconstrained model point out that the fit indicator of each of the constrained models was appreciably worse than the fit indicator of the base model (p = 5%). Therefore, a proof of discriminant validity was obvious in the measurement model, given that the probability that all combinations of the variables sufficiently represent the same construct is less than 0.05.
| Fig. 2: | Conceptualization of quality of work life as formative constructs |
All components of the QWL concept have a significant as well as positive relationship with the second order construct. These results offer supplementary evidence that QWL has four dimensions.
Nomological validity: The proof of nomological validity is established by a construct’s possession of diverse antecedents, outcomes, or modified circumstances and quantitative dissimilarities in the degree to which a construct is linked to drivers or consequences or differs across situations in showing consequential effects (Iacobucci et al., 1995). Accordingly, the four QWL dimensions were investigated within a nomological network including employee commitment. Several authors support the significant relationship between QWL and employee commitment (Khan et al., 2011; Chughtai, 2008). Morgan and Hunt (1994) investigated the concept of employee commitment within their conceptualization of commitment-trust. Committed employees are less likely to go away, are more motivated as well as they are more likely to engage in organizational citizenship behaviors (Morgan and Hunt, 1994). Prior research about employee commitment (Porter et al., 1974) conceptualizes the concept as a unidimensional construct that illustrates employee identification with the organization. Nevertheless, not all forms of employee commitment are similar (Meyer et al., 1993). Meyer and Allen (1991) suggested three-component model of employee commitment that includes emotional commitment, continuance commitment and normative commitment.
To operationalize employee commitment six items were used (5-point format ranging from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree”) employed in past research (Louis, 1998). The labels were: “I frequently take on extra tasks or responsibilities that I think will benefit the organization”, “I wouldn’t want to work in any other organization”, “The reputation and performance of this organization is important to me”, “I try very hard to show to clients/patients/citizens that I care about them”, “It’s important for me to know something about my clients/patients/citizens’ families” and “I am always thinking about ways of improving my work” (Cronbach alpha = 0.71).
| Table 2: | Properties of the confirmatory factor analysis for quality of work life |
The structural model fit the data well and Fig. 3 illustrates the detailed results. The path between QWL and employee commitment is positive and significant (loading = 1.129, t-value = 121.027). It is worthy to note that this result gives support to the nomological validity of QWL constructs.
DISCUSSION
A basic principle of quality management is that to improve quality its basic elements must be made operationalized (Ibrahim, 2011). The current investigation suggests a multidimensional model of QWL. The QWL is a complex concept that has made a big debate in the academic literature about its conceptualization, operationalization and definition. The present research proves that QWL is a second-order factor. This scheme regarding measurement corresponds to the entity practicality of latent variable hypothesis as well as the ontological concept of validity, rather than the instrumentalism and the formative frameworks. This analysis conceptualizes employees’ QWL as an attitude since the operation of measures on attitudes is more consistent with the reflective analysis (Iacobucci, 2010).
| Fig. 3: | Effect of QWL on employee commitment |
By cautiously scrutinizing the rigorous validation modus operandi of formative constructs via the path analysis, the study results in a mainly wide-ranging measurement index. The employees formulate their attitudes towards QWL on the basis of a number of facets. They establish their evaluation of QWL dimensions on the assessment of the corresponding variables. The grouping of numerous factors corresponds to an employee’s overall perception of QWL. Therefore, perceived QWL has a higher-order factor structure (“Stress at work”, “Work occupy”, “Job and career satisfaction” and “Working conditions”) which are fashioned by 30 indicators. Managers can establish priorities in the decisions related to QWL improvement, in view of the comprehensive assessment in each key factor and regulating their strategies and plans to enhance their images in attracting and retaining employees, to recover organizational management, to reinforce employee identification to the organization and to diminish employees’ turnover. The study’s practical support upholds the psychometrical properties of the proposed measurement scale, its reliability, convergent, discriminant, as well as nomological validity. All the paths in the structural model are clearly established which confirms that each component is rightfully regarded as an aspect of QWL.
The use of sample from diverse organizations and different settings for the EFA and the CFA makes the study more accurate. Consistent with the findings, the four dimensions are not drivers of QWL but rather expressions of the complexity of the construct. QWL is a second-order factor underlying the components. Therefore, variations in the QWL produced by the change in the perception of one component will affect the perception of the rest of components because of the relationship between them.
The suggested multidimensional QWL model is a significant strategic instrument to detect the weak spot and strength of the organization performance. This index could be a diagnostic tool that will help managers to recognize quality of work life areas that are frail and need a particular consideration. The findings demonstrate that QWL is an important antecedent of employees’ commitment. Developing any new instrument model is valuable for research as long as this work helps better explain a phenomenon by conforming to all psychometric criteria. Therefore, researchers save time and energy to concentrate on the crux of their investigations.
The QWL is related to several key organizational outcomes, for example work engagement (Kanten and Sadullah, 2012), organizational justice (Gillet et al., 2013), social networking (Omar et al., 2014) and Job satisfaction (Hosseinabadi et al., 2013). Hence, the study of QWL can offer organizations a vigorous tool for accomplishing their strategic objectives. Other academicians can replicate the proposed scale in different cultures so as to generalize results. The model is empirically tested on one only country (KSA) and there is a probability of a cultural bias playing a role in the findings of the study as perceptions of individuals may be different from country to country. Even though, some items are edited in accordance with past literature and the actual situation, there is no way of guaranteeing that other components were not omitted.
It is worth noting that manager should regularly deploy QWL questionnaires in order to get a dynamic illustration of evaluations and attitudes over time with the aim of enriching the dynamic analysis. Further investigations must take into consideration diverse variables in the examination of QWL assessments, such as the effect of governance as well as the role of leadership on QWL perception. These aspects also have to be considered in order to gain a more comprehensive view of QWL; as a result, employees’ perception of QWL weakness or excellence must be assumed with watchfulness given that it could have been influenced by different aspects that are not a particular factor of QWL.
In order to gain a factual representative sample in the present investigation, female employees were not excluded. Consequently, QWL for both male and female employees might be parallel. In the future when the QWL scale is employed in large-scale, researchers should examine whether there are some discrepancies in QWL between male and female employees.
The main limitation of this research relates to the systematic nature of the analytical method. All the anticipated components need to be assessed in the suggested measurement scale and none can be deleted or added by the respondents. Lastly, one more limitation relates to the country and the organizations in which the scale is developed and tested. Replicating the index across many organizations from other countries than Saudi Arabia could help verify the reliability as well as the validity of the index.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The analysis presented in this study is part of a broader research project conducted by the author aimed at understanding and evaluating the dimensions of QWL and its applications in Saudi work environment. The ultimate goal of such a project is to improve quality of work life, human performance and organizational effectiveness. The author appreciates the encouragement and financial support provided by the Northern Border University, represented by the Deanship of Scientific Research. The author also wishes to express thanks to Dr. Hafedh Ibrahim for valuable advice in statistical analysis.
| Appendix: | The whole list of items |