Money Ethic Scale

Abstract

The Money Ethic Scale (MES), developed by organizational psychologist Thomas Li-Ping Tang in 1990, is a foundational psychometric instrument designed to measure an individual’s subjective meaning of money, attitudinal orientations toward financial resources, and cognitive-affective valuation of wealth. Grounded in attitude theory and social cognitive frameworks, the instrument shifts the paradigm from treating money purely as an objective, fungible economic unit toward conceptualizing it as a multidimensional psychological construct that influences organizational behavior, motivation, and ethical decision-making. The classic 30-item version of the MES evaluates six distinct dimensions: Good (9 items), Evil (6 items), Achievement (4 items), Respect/Self-Esteem (4 items), Budget (3 items), and Freedom/Power (4 items). Responses are recorded on a 7-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (disagree strongly) through 4 (neutral) to 7 (agree strongly).

Initial psychometric evaluations conducted on a heterogeneous sample of 249 organizational employees demonstrated satisfactory to strong internal consistency across the six factors, with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients ranging from .68 to .81: Good (α = .81), Evil (α = .69), Achievement (α = .70), Respect/Self-Esteem (α = .68), Budget (α = .72), and Freedom/Power (α = .71). Four-week test-retest reliability across a subsample of 50 employees yielded stability coefficients ranging from .56 to .83. An initial principal components factor analysis accounted for 42.8% of the total variance, confirming the utility of parsing monetary attitudes into affective, cognitive, and behavioral domains. The MES has established extensive construct, convergent, and criterion validity across decades of research, serving as a critical predictor of compensation satisfaction, organizational citizenship behaviors, turnover intentions, academic integrity, and unethical corporate conduct across diverse international contexts.

Keywords

Money Ethic Scale, Thomas Li-Ping Tang, monetary attitudes, psychology of money, compensation satisfaction, organizational behavior, behavioral economics, Love of Money, ethical decision-making, work motivation

Authors

The Money Ethic Scale was conceptualized and developed by Thomas Li-Ping Tang, Ph.D., a distinguished American organizational psychologist and Emeritus Professor of Management in the Jennings A. Jones College of Business at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU), Murfreesboro, Tennessee, United States. Dr. Tang received his doctoral degree in Industrial and Organizational Psychology from Purdue University under the mentorship of pioneering organizational scholars.

Dr. Tang’s research agenda has focused almost exclusively on the intersection of organizational psychology, compensation systems, behavioral ethics, and the subjective meaning of financial resources. His empirical work introduced the “Money Ethic” and later the “Love of Money” (LOM) constructs into mainstream management and psychological literature. Over a career spanning more than four decades, Tang has collaborated with hundreds of international scholars across dozens of countries, publishing extensive cross-cultural validations, structural equation models, and longitudinal investigations regarding how individuals frame money and how that framing affects job satisfaction, work-related stress, organizational commitment, voluntary turnover, counterproductive workplace behaviors, and systemic corporate corruption.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Money Ethic Scale is to capture, operationalize, and quantify the multifaceted cognitive, affective, and behavioral meanings that human beings attach to money. Historically, classical economics, neoclassical economics, and traditional management paradigms treated money as a neutral, fungible, and universally standardized exchange medium. Within early reinforcement paradigms, such as B. F. Skinner’s radical behaviorism, money was operationalized simply as a generalized conditioned reinforcer: an objective instrument whose value stemmed solely from the primary reinforcers it could obtain. Consequently, industrial and organizational researchers frequently assumed that financial incentives elicited uniform motivational forces across different employee cohorts.

Tang challenged this oversimplified assumption, asserting that money is a highly personal, emotionally charged, and symbolically dense construct. Money carries profound social, ethical, and psychological valences that differ drastically across individuals, cultures, socioeconomic strata, and occupations. Two workers earning identical base salaries may exhibit diametrically opposed organizational attitudes, job performance levels, and ethical inclinations based entirely on their subjective psychological framing of money. The MES was constructed to give behavioral scientists, industrial-organizational psychologists, sociologists, and business ethicists a standardized, psychometrically rigorous instrument to measure these internalized monetary values.

In applied settings, the MES serves several complementary diagnostic and empirical functions:

• Compensation and Reward Management: The scale enables organizational human resource strategists to examine why identical pay structures produce divergent levels of pay satisfaction. Individuals who view money primarily as a metric of personal achievement or respect respond differently to merit pay, stock options, and pay-for-performance incentives compared to those who view money predominantly through a prudential budgeting lens or an affective “evil” lens.
• Behavioral Ethics and Corporate Compliance: Empirical investigations consistently demonstrate that high endorsement of money as a symbol of power, freedom, and success, uncoupled from moral budgeting or paired with low ethical sensitivity, directly predicts unethical intentions. The MES is widely used to forecast propensity toward white-collar crimes, compromise of professional standards, academic cheating, intellectual theft, and counterproductive workplace behaviors (CWBs).
• Work Stress, Well-Being, and Turnover Modeling: By investigating mismatches between an employee’s monetary ambitions and their actual earning trajectory, the MES serves as an effective diagnostic tool in modeling burnout, voluntary organizational departure, organizational cynicism, and depression.
• Cross-Cultural Comparative Research: The scale provides a standardized measurement infrastructure for cross-national comparisons, allowing social scientists to investigate how macroeconomic development, religious traditions, welfare structures, and cultural dimensions (e.g., individualism vs. collectivism, power distance) shape the psychological meaning of financial accumulation.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct measured by the Money Ethic Scale is the Money Ethic: an organized, cognitive-affective schema and behavioral belief system that dictates how an individual perceives, evaluates, and interacts with financial capital. Drawing directly from the classic tripartite framework of attitudes—comprising affective (emotional evaluations), cognitive (beliefs, attributions, and symbolic associations), and behavioral (action tendencies, habits, and self-regulatory patterns) components—the Money Ethic constitutes an individual-difference variable situated within an individual’s broader nomological network of personal values, such as the Protestant Work Ethic and the Leisure Ethic.

In its comprehensive 30-item operationalization, the Money Ethic construct is structured into six correlated yet conceptually distinct subdimensions:

1. Good (Affective and General Evaluative Dimension)

The Good subscale measures the extent to which an individual views money as a positive, functional, attractive, and fundamentally beneficial element of human existence. Encompassing 9 items (e.g., “Money is good,” “Money is attractive,” “Money is valuable”), this dimension assesses the baseline positive emotional valence attached to currency. High scorers perceive money not as a corrupting influence, but as a benign tool that enriches life, provides security, and makes daily existence rewarding, stable, and enjoyable. It reflects a positive affective orientation toward wealth and financial prosperity.

2. Evil (Moral and Pejorative Dimension)

The Evil subscale captures negative moral judgments, societal critiques, and suspicion directed toward money. Comprising 6 items (e.g., “Money is evil,” “Money is the root of all evil,” “Money is shameful”), this factor gauges the degree to which money is viewed as an instrument of moral decay, social stratification, alienation, and corruption. Individuals scoring high on this dimension associate money with moral compromise, greed, and superficial relationships, viewing excessive financial preoccupation as destructive to psychological well-being and communal solidarity.

3. Achievement (Cognitive and Meritocratic Metric Dimension)

The Achievement subscale operationalizes money as an objective scorecard of personal competence, success, and industrious accomplishment. Consisting of 4 items (e.g., “Money represents one’s achievement,” “Money is a symbol of success”), this cognitive facet taps into the internalized belief that accumulated capital reflects individual effort, capability, diligence, and value delivery in the marketplace. For high scorers, money functions as concrete evidence that one has prevailed in competitive environments and attained a high standard of personal efficacy.

4. Respect/Self-Esteem (Social Status and External Validation Dimension)

The Respect/Self-Esteem subscale measures the belief that possessing wealth elicits admiration, social deference, communal prestige, and enhanced personal self-worth. Containing 4 items (e.g., “Money makes people respect you in the community,” “Money will help you express your competence and abilities”), this dimension reflects the social identity value of financial capital. High scorers view money as a crucial passport to social inclusion, interpersonal stature, and visible standing, believing that community respect is inextricably linked to personal wealth.

5. Budget (Behavioral and Prudential Stewardship Dimension)

The Budget subscale shifts the focus to deliberate, disciplined, and self-regulatory fiscal behaviors. Comprising 3 items (e.g., “I pay my bills immediately in order to avoid interest or penalties,” “I use my money very carefully,” “I budget my money very well”), this factor assesses an individual’s behavioral competence in managing, tracking, and allocating monetary resources. It captures conscientiousness, financial impulse control, risk aversion, and long-term planning, distinguishing those who practice careful financial stewardship from impulsive spenders.

6. Freedom/Power (Instrumental Agency and Autonomy Dimension)

The Freedom/Power subscale evaluates money as a mechanism for personal autonomy, systemic independence, and socio-political leverage over one’s environment and other people. Encompassing 4 items (e.g., “Money gives you autonomy and freedom,” “Money means power,” “Money can give you the opportunity to be what you want to be”), this construct measures the degree to which financial independence is equated with existential sovereignty. High scorers believe that wealth provides emancipation from external constraints, allows them to dictate their own destiny, and grants authoritative control over situational outcomes.

Theoretical Framework

The construction and validation of the Money Ethic Scale are situated at the crossroads of several major psychological, sociological, and economic theories. Tang drew heavily upon Attitude Theory, particularly the tripartite ABC model formulated by social psychologists such as Milton Rokeach, Martin Fishbein, and Icek Ajzen. Under this model, an attitude toward any object consists of:

• Affect: Emotional reactions, visceral feelings, and basic preferences toward money (represented in the MES by the Good and Evil subscales).
• Behavior: Overt actions, habitual behaviors, and intentional practices concerning financial management (represented by the Budget subscale).
• Cognition: Rational beliefs, value attributions, and semantic representations of what money signifies in social life (represented by the Achievement, Respect/Self-Esteem, and Freedom/Power subscales).

Sociologically, the MES builds upon Max Weber’s classical treatise on the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905). Weber postulated that ascetic Protestantism fostered a moral obligation toward diligent labor, disciplined capital accumulation, and systematic avoidance of wasteful consumption. Psychological operationalizations of this construct, such as Mirels and Garrett’s (1971) Protestant Work Ethic (PWE) scale, demonstrated that individuals who endorse hard work as a moral good place distinct values on financial stewardship. Tang integrated these tenets into the MES, demonstrating that while the Protestant Work Ethic emphasizes the intrinsic virtue of work and labor, the Money Ethic focuses specifically on the psychological meaning assigned to the output of that labor: the money itself.

From an organizational perspective, the scale aligns with J. Stacy Adams’ Equity Theory and Edward Lawler’s models of pay satisfaction. Equity theory posits that employees continuously evaluate the ratio of their internal inputs (effort, education, competence, time) to their received outcomes (salary, bonuses, recognition) relative to referent others. The MES expands this paradigm by asserting that the “outcome” term in equity equations is not psychologically uniform. An employee who scores exceptionally high on the Achievement and Respect dimensions of the MES requires significantly larger increments of compensation to perceive fairness and validation than an employee who scores high primarily on the Budget dimension.

Furthermore, the MES interfaces with Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan), specifically regarding intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. The pursuit of wealth as an extrinsic life aspiration has been linked to compromised psychological well-being. However, the MES reveals critical nuances: when money is pursued primarily for autonomy and freedom (closer to intrinsic self-actualization needs), its negative psychological correlates diminish; conversely, when money is pursued as an instrument of social dominance, power over others, or external validation (Respect/Self-Esteem), it correlates strongly with psychological distress, interpersonal conflict, and ethical vulnerability.

Validity

The construct, convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related validity of the Money Ethic Scale has been examined across numerous empirical studies involving diverse occupational, academic, and demographic samples.

Construct and Factorial Validity

Construct validity was initially established through exploratory and confirmatory factor analytic procedures. Tang (1990, 1992) demonstrated that the 30 items cleanly loaded onto the six hypothesized theoretical dimensions, accounting for a robust 42.8% of the total variance in the original employee sample (N = 249). Subsequent research across distinct occupational cohorts—including mental health professionals, public sector administrators, manufacturing personnel, and bank executives—consistently reproduced the multidimensional architecture, verifying that monetary attitudes cannot be compressed into a single unidimensional index.

Convergent and Nomological Validity

Tang evaluated the nomological network of the MES by assessing its correlations with established psychometric inventories:

• Protestant Work Ethic (PWE): As theoretically predicted, the Budget and Achievement subscales of the MES demonstrated significant, moderate-to-strong positive correlations with Mirels and Garrett’s PWE scale (r values typically ranging between .30 and .48, p < .001). Individuals who view hard work as a central moral imperative likewise view money as a marker of achievement and endorse strict financial budgeting.
• Job Descriptive Index (JDI): Correlations between MES dimensions and the pay satisfaction subscale of Smith, Kendall, and Hulin’s Job Descriptive Index revealed nuanced relationships. High endorsement of money as Evil was inversely related to pay satisfaction, whereas individuals scoring high on Budget tended to report more stable, positive evaluations of their compensation levels.
• Leisure Ethic: The Freedom/Power subscale correlated positively with the Leisure Ethic Scale, illustrating that individuals who prioritize personal freedom through wealth also place significant value on discretionary leisure time and personal autonomy.

Criterion-Related and Predictive Validity

The MES has demonstrated strong predictive utility across a spectrum of critical organizational and social criteria:

• Turnover Intentions: Drawing upon Michael Campion’s (1991) frameworks on employee withdrawal, Tang and colleagues established that employees with exceptionally high scores on the Achievement and Respect subscales exhibit significantly higher turnover intentions when salary progression stalls. Such individuals interpret compensation plateaus not merely as economic constraints, but as institutional invalidations of their personal competence.
• Organizational Citizenship Behaviors (OCB): Freshwater (2011) and related investigators explored individual predictors of service-oriented and general OCBs, discovering that excessive focus on money as power and external respect attenuates altruistic, prosocial organizational behaviors, whereas individuals with balanced, stewardship-oriented monetary ethics (high Budget, moderate Good) display higher levels of civic virtue and interpersonal helping.
• Unethical and Counterproductive Work Behavior: Across multiple international inquiries led by Tang, high scores on the symbolic value of money (particularly when paired with a high “Love of Money”) reliably predict tolerance for unethical business practices, academic dishonesty, insider trading simulations, and corruption, establishing strong criterion validity in the domain of behavioral business ethics.

Reliability

The reliability profile of the Money Ethic Scale has been thoroughly documented across internal consistency parameters and temporal stability assessments.

Internal Consistency

In the original normative validation study involving 249 full-time employees, student-workers, and faculty members representing public and private educational institutions, commercial banks, healthcare centers, and churches, Cronbach’s alpha coefficients (α) for the six subscales were reported as follows:

• Good: α = .81 (9 items) — Reflects strong internal consistency, demonstrating high item homogeneity regarding the positive evaluative aspects of money.
• Evil: α = .69 (6 items) — Marginally acceptable internal consistency, reflecting slight conceptual dispersion among items assessing money’s moral destructiveness versus its perceived social uselessness.
• Achievement: α = .70 (4 items) — Demonstrates adequate reliability for an abbreviated 4-item cognitive subscale.
• Respect/Self-Esteem: α = .68 (4 items) — Approaching the conventional .70 benchmark; acceptable for exploratory and descriptive organizational research.
• Budget: α = .72 (3 items) — Notable internal consistency despite its compact 3-item length, indicating strong covariance among self-reported budgeting behaviors.
• Freedom/Power: α = .71 (4 items) — Satisfactory reliability capturing the dual constructs of personal autonomy and social control.

Test-Retest Temporal Stability

To establish the stability of the instrument over time, Tang administered the 30-item MES to a subsample of 50 organizational employees across a four-week interval. The Pearson product-moment test-retest correlation coefficients (r) were:

• Good: r = .67 (p < .001)
• Evil: r = .56 (p < .001)
• Achievement: r = .61 (p < .001)
• Respect/Self-Esteem: r = .63 (p < .001)
• Budget: r = .65 (p < .001)
• Freedom/Power: r = .83 (p < .001)

The four-week stability coefficients confirmed that monetary attitudes operate predominantly as stable, trait-like psychological orientations rather than transient state-dependent fluctuations. The exceptionally high stability of the Freedom/Power dimension (r = .83) highlights how deeply ingrained the association between financial capital and personal agency is in adult working populations. The comparatively lower stability of the Evil dimension (r = .56) suggested that moral evaluations of money may be more sensitive to immediate situational cues, such as short-term financial stressors or contemporary ethical scandals in the news.

Factor Analysis

The empirical derivation of the Money Ethic Scale’s internal structure was conducted using Principal Components Analysis (PCA) followed by orthogonal (Varimax) rotation on the preliminary pool of items. In the normative sample of 249 employees, eigenvalues exceeding the traditional Kaiser criterion of 1.0 were extracted, yielding an optimal six-factor solution that accounted for 42.8% of the total variance.

Factor Loadings and Variance Distribution

• Factor 1: Good (9 items) — This factor emerged as the largest principal component, explaining the highest proportion of shared variance. Highly loading items included statements describing money as good, valuable, attractive, and important to human life (e.g., “Money is good,” “Money is valuable,” “Money is attractive”). Item factor loadings on this dimension were robust, generally clustering between .52 and .78.
• Factor 2: Evil (6 items) — Defined by statements characterizing money as a destructive, useless, or corruptive influence (e.g., “Money is evil,” “Money is the root of all evil,” “Money is shameful”). Loadings on Factor 2 ranged from .48 to .73, forming an inverse evaluative pole relative to Factor 1.
• Factor 3: Achievement (4 items) — Encompassed items associating monetary compensation with success and competence (e.g., “Money represents one’s achievement,” “Money is a symbol of success”). Factor loadings ranged from .55 to .74, demonstrating distinct discriminant separation from general positive affect.
• Factor 4: Respect/Self-Esteem (4 items) — Captured the social visibility and community prestige afforded by financial resources (e.g., “Money makes people respect you in the community”). Factor loadings on this component ranged from .50 to .71.
• Factor 5: Budget (3 items) — Highly unified around behavioral fiscal discipline and prompt bill payment (e.g., “I budget my money very well,” “I use my money very carefully”). Item loadings were clean and pronounced, ranging from .62 to .80, with negligible cross-loadings on affective dimensions.
• Factor 6: Freedom/Power (4 items) — Clustered items conceptualizing money as autonomy, personal liberty, and socio-political agency (e.g., “Money means power,” “Money gives you autonomy and freedom”). Factor loadings ranged from .54 to .76.

Subsequent Factor Analytic Developments

Following the 1990 exploratory analysis, Tang (1995) and subsequent cross-cultural research teams (e.g., Tang & Luna-Arocas, 1997) conducted Confirmatory Factor Analyses (CFA) across diverse international datasets. CFA testing supported the theoretical six-factor structure over alternative one-factor, two-factor, and three-factor nested models, yielding acceptable goodness-of-fit indices (e.g., Comparative Fit Index [CFI] > .90, Root Mean Square Error of Approximation [RMSEA] ≤ .06). These structural investigations also supported the later creation of abbreviated versions of the scale (such as the 15-item, 12-item, and 6-item short forms), which consolidated and refined the factors into the widely utilized “Love of Money” scale while retaining the core constructs of Rich, Motivator, and Evil.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Money Ethic Scale (MES)
• Author: Thomas Li-Ping Tang, Ph.D.
• Initial Publication Year: 1990 (ERIC ED 318 984); subsequently expanded in 1992, 1993, and 1995
• Instrument Type: Multidimensional self-report psychological inventory
• Target Population: Adults, working professionals, university students, and organizational employees across diverse industries
• Administration Format: Paper-and-pencil questionnaire or digital computer-administered survey
• Administration Time: Approximately 7 to 10 minutes to complete the full 30-item inventory
• Number of Items: 30 items (in the primary standard form described herein; variants exist containing 6, 12, 15, and the original preliminary 50 items)
• Response Format: 7-point Likert-type rating scale anchored as follows:
  • 1 = Disagree strongly
  • 2 = Disagree
  • 3 = Disagree somewhat
  • 4 = Neutral
  • 5 = Agree somewhat
  • 6 = Agree
  • 7 = Agree strongly
• Subscale Breakdown:
  • Good: 9 items (Items 1, 2, 3, 6, 11, 13, 17, 19, 22)
  • Evil: 6 items (Items 4, 12, 14, 16, 23, 24)
  • Achievement: 4 items (Items 5, 7, 8, 28)
  • Respect/Self-Esteem: 4 items (Items 10, 15, 18, 20)
  • Budget: 3 items (Items 26, 29, 30)
  • Freedom/Power: 4 items (Items 9, 21, 25, 27)
• Scoring Procedures: Subscale scores are calculated by computing the arithmetic mean or summing the raw integer values of the items assigned to each respective dimension. Items within each subscale are phrased consistently in their positive direction for that construct, meaning reverse-scoring is generally not required when calculating independent dimension scores. Higher scores indicate stronger endorsement of that specific monetary attitude or behavior. Profile analysis or structural equation modeling is recommended rather than combining all 30 items into an omnibus aggregate score, as the subscales represent distinct, sometimes opposing, psychological constructs.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Money Ethic Scale was initially formulated and presented by Thomas Li-Ping Tang in 1990 at the Southwestern Psychological Association and deposited into the Education Resources Information Center (ERIC document ED 318 984). Formal peer-reviewed journal publications presenting empirical validations followed shortly thereafter in the Journal of Organizational Behavior (1992, 1993) and Personality and Individual Differences (1995).

Licensing and Fair Use: The scale items, scoring metrics, and factor structures have been published openly within academic journals and government-sponsored educational repositories for scholarly, research, and non-commercial educational purposes. Academic researchers, behavioral scientists, dissertation students, and university educators may typically utilize the 30-item MES without payment of licensing fees, provided that appropriate scholarly attribution and formal citation are given to Dr. Thomas Li-Ping Tang. Commercial use, inclusion in proprietary corporate assessment batteries, or integration into fee-for-service consulting software requires prior direct authorization and formal licensing agreements from the copyright holder or the original academic publishers.

References

• Campion, M. A. (1991). Meaning and measurement of turnover: Comparison of alternative measures and recommendations for research. Journal of Applied Psychology, 76(2), 199–212. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.76.2.199
• Freshwater, E. K. (2011). Individual predictors of service organizational citizenship behaviors (Doctoral dissertation, Walden University). ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global.
• Furnham, A. (1996). Attitudinal correlates and demographic predictors of monetary beliefs and behaviors. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 17(4), 375–388. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0030477
• Tang, T. L. P. (1990). The meaning of money revisited: Workers’ view. Paper presented at the 36th Annual Meeting of the Southwestern Psychological Association, Dallas, TX. ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED 318 984. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED318984
• Tang, T. L. P. (1992). The meaning of money revisited. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 13(2), 197–202. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.4030130209
• Tang, T. L. P. (1993). The meaning of money: Extension and exploration of the Money Ethic Scale in a sample of university students. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 14(1), 93–99. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.4030140109
• Tang, T. L. P. (1995). The development of a short Money Ethic Scale: Attitudes toward money and pay satisfaction revisited. Personality and Individual Differences, 19(6), 809–817. https://doi.org/10.1016/0191-8869(95)00133-6
• Tang, T. L. P., & Gilbert, P. R. (1995). Attitudes toward money as related to intrinsic and extrinsic job satisfaction, stress and work-related attitudes. Personality and Individual Differences, 19(3), 327–332. https://doi.org/10.1016/0191-8869(95)00057-D
• Tang, T. L. P., & Luna-Arocas, R. (1997). Money as a motivator and the endorsement of the money ethic among university faculty in the USA and Spain: The development of a new Money Ethic Scale. Paper presented at the International Association for Research in Economic Psychology (IAREP) Conference, Valencia, Spain.

Items of the Scale