Work-Related Expectancies scale

1. Abstract

The Work-Related Expectancies Scale (WRES), formulated by Robert Eisenberger, Peter Fasolo, and Valerie Davis-LaMastro in their foundational 1990 investigation published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, is an established psychometric instrument designed to measure subjective performance-outcome instrumentalities in organizational settings. Rooted within Victor Vroom’s expectancy theory and organizational support theory, the scale gauges the extent to which employees perceive that superior task execution, diligence, and work quality will lead systematically to material and socioemotional organizational rewards. The instrument comprises nine items distributed across two empirically derived subscales: (1) Pay and Promotion Expectancies (four items capturing tangible, extrinsic organizational outcomes such as wage increases and career advancement), and (2) Approval, Recognition, and Influence Expectancies (five items capturing social, interpersonal, and intrinsic rewards such as managerial praise, socioemotional validation, upward voice, and job security). Respondents evaluate each item using a 5-point Likert-type anchor metric ranging from 1 (definitely not part of my job) to 5 (extremely true of my job). Across extensive validation studies involving diverse occupational cohorts—including hourly manufacturing employees, administrative personnel, and managerial cadres—the WRES has displayed high internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha coefficients consistently ranging from .77 to .89). Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses demonstrate a robust two-factor orthogonal or oblique configuration that exhibits structural invariance across occupational strata. Construct, convergent, and criterion-related validities are supported by significant positive correlations with perceived organizational support (POS), job satisfaction, employee diligence, affective organizational commitment, job involvement, and participative decision-making, along with negative associations with role ambiguity and role conflict. This article provides a comprehensive psychometric review of the WRES, detailing its structural dimensions, scoring methodology, empirical applications, and full inventory items.

2. Keywords

Work-Related Expectancies Scale, expectancy theory, perceived organizational support, performance-reward expectancy, instrumentality, employee motivation, pay and promotion expectancies, supervisory recognition, job performance, psychometrics

3. Authors

The Work-Related Expectancies Scale was developed by a team of organizational psychology researchers led by Robert Eisenberger in collaboration with Peter Fasolo and Valerie Davis-LaMastro:

• Robert Eisenberger, Ph.D.: Professor of Psychology and Management. Dr. Eisenberger held academic appointments at the University of Delaware and later served as Research Professor of Psychology and Management at the University of Houston. Widely recognized as the pioneer of Perceived Organizational Support (POS) and organizational support theory (OST), his research focuses on reward contingencies, employee-organization reciprocity, generalized exchange relationships, and intrinsic-extrinsic motivation.
• Peter Fasolo, Ph.D.: Industrial and organizational psychologist who completed his doctoral training under Dr. Eisenberger’s mentorship, contributing extensively to empirical paradigms examining organizational commitment, social exchange dynamics, and corporate human resource practices. He later pursued an executive career in global human resource management, serving as Chief Human Resources Officer at Johnson & Johnson.
• Valerie Davis-LaMastro, Ph.D.: Organizational psychologist and co-researcher on the early structural validation studies of perceived organizational support, diligence, job innovation, and reward expectancy architectures at the University of Delaware.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Work-Related Expectancies Scale is to systematically quantify an employee’s subjective probability estimates regarding the link between job performance and subsequent organizational outcomes. In contemporary psychometrics and organizational psychology, understanding why employees allocate discretionary effort requires dissecting their psychological cost-benefit appraisals. The WRES addresses this need by operationalizing the construct of instrumentality—the subjective belief that achieving high performance criteria will result in desired organizational outcomes.

In applied organizational research, the WRES serves several specific diagnostic, developmental, and evaluative purposes:

• Assessing Performance-Outcome Contingencies: The scale enables organizational diagnosticians to evaluate whether employees genuinely believe their workplace operates as a meritocracy. If high diligence, rapid output, and exceptional task quality are perceived as decoupled from wage growth, promotion, or managerial praise, performance motivation diminishes.
• Diagnosing Reward System Effectiveness: Human resource leaders and industrial psychologists employ the scale to audit reward management programs. Discrepancies between formal compensation policies and employee-reported expectancies identify breakdowns in supervisory communication, inequitable reward distribution, or perceived procedural injustice.
• Testing Organizational Support and Social Exchange Mechanisms: Within academic research, the WRES functions as a critical antecedent and mediator in structural equation models exploring social exchange theory. It helps researchers discern whether high perceived organizational support generates felt obligation through purely socioemotional appreciation or through reinforced beliefs that hard work yields concrete material rewards.
• Evaluating Managerial Leadership and Supervision: Because five of the scale’s items assess managerial responsiveness—such as listening to high performers’ opinions, granting recognition, and providing supervisory approval—the tool functions as an index of supervisory fairness and leadership coaching quality.

By measuring both formal material rewards (pay raises, career promotions) and informal psychological currencies (recognition, voice, autonomy, and security), the WRES provides a nuanced behavioral profile of the organizational motivational climate.

5. Psychological Construct

The psychological construct evaluated by the WRES is performance-outcome expectancy (instrumentality), defined as the subjective cognitive appraisal that a specific level of job exertion and task attainment will be followed by particular organizational outcomes. Rather than viewing motivation as an undifferentiated general drive, the psychometric architecture of the WRES reflects two distinct sub-dimensions:

1. Pay and Promotion Expectancies (Tangible / Extrinsic Outcomes)

This subscale captures cognitive assessments regarding tangible, transactional, and socio-structural organizational resources. It measures whether the employee expects quantitative output (finishing high volumes of work), qualitative excellence (completing high-quality work), and temporal efficiency (finishing tasks rapidly and punctually) to directly produce formal institutional rewards. These rewards encompass:

• Merit-Based Compensation: Beliefs that superior task pacing and output translate into salary increments, bonuses, or financial compensation.
• Upward Hierarchical Mobility: Beliefs that consistent, high-standard execution improves one’s competitive standing for promotions and internal career progression.

From an organizational behavior perspective, high scores on this dimension reflect an employee who views the organization’s formal administrative apparatus as predictable, equitable, and reliably meritocratic.

2. Approval, Recognition, and Influence Expectancies (Socioemotional / Relational Outcomes)

This subscale captures relational, supervisory, and interpersonal rewards that satisfy fundamental psychological needs for competence, status, and relatedness. Rather than relying on distant corporate committees or formal compensation bands, these outcomes depend primarily on the behavior of the immediate supervisor. Specific facets include:

• Supervisory Approval and Social Recognition: The expectation that completing tasks promptly and managing demanding workloads will elicit overt managerial praise, respect, and validation.
• Upward Influence and Voice: The belief that demonstrating high performance yields communicative influence, prompting supervisors to pay closer attention to the employee’s operational opinions, ideas, and strategic recommendations.
• Felt Job Security: The perception that maintaining high productivity and meeting operational deadlines provides tenure stability and protection against organizational downsizing or termination.

These two dimensions are moderately correlated yet conceptually distinct: an organization may reliably offer supervisory praise (high approval expectancy) while retaining rigid salary caps (low pay/promotion expectancy), or vice versa.

6. Theoretical Framework

The Work-Related Expectancies Scale is rooted in two foundational theories in organizational psychology: Expectancy Theory of Motivation and Organizational Support Theory.

Vroom’s VIE Theory

Victor Vroom (1964) posited that employee motivation is a multiplicative function of three cognitive components: Valence, Instrumentality, and Expectancy (the VIE model):

• Expectancy (E → P): The subjective probability that effort will lead to successful task performance.
• Instrumentality (P → O): The subjective probability that successful task performance will lead to a particular outcome. The WRES directly operationalizes this instrumentality dimension.
• Valence (V): The subjective affective value or attractiveness that the employee assigns to that outcome.

Eisenberger and colleagues recognized that while classic laboratory tests of Vroom’s theory often treated outcomes as monolithic, real-world workplaces require distinguishing between distinct classes of outcomes. Different operational criteria (speed, volume, quality) are linked to different types of organizational rewards (monetary vs. social). The WRES formalizes these performance-outcome pathways into a standardized psychometric questionnaire.

Organizational Support Theory and Social Exchange

Eisenberger, Huntington, Hutchison, and Sowa (1986), followed by Eisenberger, Fasolo, and Davis-LaMastro (1990), embedded work-related expectancies into the broader framework of Organizational Support Theory. According to this framework, employees form a generalized belief regarding the extent to which the organization values their contributions and cares about their well-being. This perceived organizational support (POS) is driven by reward expectancies: when employees observe that high performance is acknowledged through pay raises, promotions, and supervisory respect, they infer that the organization is benevolent, attentive, and dependable. This inference triggers the norm of reciprocity, motivating employees to reciprocate with increased diligence, organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB), and reduced turnover intentions.

7. Validity

The psychometric validity of the WRES has been evaluated across multiple occupational cohorts, including production technicians, administrative staff, and mid-level managerial personnel (Eisenberger et al., 1990; Smith & Brannick, 1990).

Construct and Factorial Validity

Exploratory factor analyses (EFA) with varimax and oblique rotations across diverse employee groups have consistently resolved the nine items into two primary latent dimensions: Pay/Promotion Expectancies and Approval/Recognition/Influence Expectancies. The factor structure demonstrated stability across both non-exempt hourly employees and exempt salaried managers, with primary factor loadings exceeding .50 and negligible secondary cross-loadings.

Convergent Validity

Convergent validity is supported by strong, statistically significant correlations with theoretical correlates measured concurrently:

• Perceived Organizational Support (POS): Both Pay/Promotion expectancies (r ≈ .42 to .54, p < .001) and Approval/Recognition expectancies (r ≈ .48 to .61, p < .001) correlate positively with POS, confirming that employees who view their workplace as merit-based perceive higher organizational benevolence.
• Job Involvement: Expectancies correlate positively with job involvement (r ≈ .30 to .41, p < .01), showing that clear performance-outcome links encourage psychological investment in work tasks.
• Participation in Decision-Making: Significant positive correlations were found with perceived involvement in workplace decisions (r ≈ .35 to .46, p < .01).

Criterion-Related and Predictive Validity

The WRES demonstrates predictive utility across essential organizational and performance criteria:

• Diligence and In-Role Job Performance: Longitudinal and supervisory-rated assessments confirm that employees with high baseline expectancy scores exhibit greater objective diligence, task speed, and lower unexcused absenteeism rates (Eisenberger et al., 1990).
• Job Satisfaction: Both subscales show substantial bivariate relationships with general and facet-specific job satisfaction (r values between .38 and .52, p < .001).
• Constructive Innovation: Employees who anticipate that good work leads to influence and recognition submit more constructive operational suggestions and innovative improvements.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity is evidenced by significant negative correlations with structural stressors: Pay/Promotion and Approval/Recognition expectancies correlate negatively with role ambiguity (r = -.32 to -.44, p < .01) and role conflict (r = -.24 to -.36, p < .01) (Smith & Brannick, 1990). When employees understand the criteria for rewards, cognitive role confusion decreases.

8. Reliability

The Work-Related Expectancies Scale exhibits robust internal consistency across independent samples:

Internal Consistency

• Pay and Promotion Subscale: In the original validation studies by Eisenberger, Fasolo, and Davis-LaMastro (1990), the Cronbach’s alpha coefficient for this 4-item subscale ranged between .77 and .84 across hourly employee and management cohorts. Subsequent replication studies (e.g., Smith & Brannick, 1990) reported alpha coefficients between .79 and .86.
• Approval, Recognition, and Influence Subscale: The 5-item socioemotional expectancy subscale yielded alpha coefficients ranging between .82 and .89 across various industrial and administrative samples.
• Full 9-Item Composite Scale: When combined as a total measure of generalized performance-outcome instrumentality, the full scale yields internal consistency estimates consistently exceeding .88.

Item-Total Correlations

Corrected item-total correlations for the respective subscales range from .51 to .74, well above the conventional psychometric threshold of .30. These values confirm that each item contributes substantial common variance to its target construct without redundancy.

9. Factor Analysis

During the development of the WRES, Eisenberger et al. (1990) conducted exploratory principal axis factor analyses with both orthogonal (Varimax) and oblique (Promax) rotations to examine the underlying dimensionality of the nine items. A clear two-factor solution emerged based on eigenvalue criteria (> 1.0) and scree plot inspection, accounting for the majority of the total variance.

Subsequent confirmatory factor analytic (CFA) studies confirmed that a two-factor correlated model offers superior fit compared to a single-factor unidimensional model:

• Two-Factor Model Fit: χ²/df < 2.20, Comparative Fit Index (CFI) ≥ .95, Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) ≥ .94, and Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) ≤ .055.
• Single-Factor Model Fit: In contrast, the one-factor model displayed unacceptable fit (χ²/df > 5.80, CFI < .80, RMSEA > .11), confirming that employees cognitively separate formal compensation from relational recognition.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Work-Related Expectancies Scale (WRES)
• Alternative Titles: Performance-Reward Expectancies Measure; Performance-Outcome Instrumentality Scale
• Authors: Robert Eisenberger, Peter Fasolo, and Valerie Davis-LaMastro (1990)
• Instrument Type: Self-report psychometric survey / organizational assessment questionnaire
• Target Population: Working adults across diverse occupational sectors, including hourly, salaried, administrative, technical, and managerial personnel
• Number of Items: 9 items
• Subscale Breakdown:
  • Pay and Promotion Expectancies: Items 1, 2, 3, and 4 (4 items)
  • Approval, Recognition, and Influence Expectancies: Items 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 (5 items)
• Response Scale: 5-point Likert-type scale anchored as follows:
  • 1 = definitely not part of my job
  • 2 = slightly true of my job
  • 3 = moderately true of my job
  • 4 = substantially true of my job
  • 5 = extremely true of my job
• Administration Time: Approximately 3 to 5 minutes
• Scoring Guidelines:
  • All 9 items are positively keyed; no reverse scoring is required.
  • Subscale Scores: Calculate the arithmetic mean of the respective items (sum of item scores divided by the number of items in that subscale). Pay/Promotion subscale score ranges from 1.00 to 5.00; Approval/Recognition/Influence subscale score ranges from 1.00 to 5.00.
  • Composite Score: If an overall measure of performance-outcome expectancy is needed, compute the mean across all 9 items.
  • Interpretation: Higher scores reflect stronger subjective perceptions that diligence, speed, and high-quality performance will be recognized and rewarded by the organization.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

• Publication Year: 1990
• Original Copyright: © 1990 by the American Psychological Association (APA). Developed and published in Eisenberger, R., Fasolo, P., & Davis-LaMastro, V. (1990). “Perceived organizational support and employee diligence, commitment, and innovation.” Journal of Applied Psychology, 75(1), 51–59.
• Permissions and Usage Terms: The scale items were published in Table 2 (p. 56) of the original article. The scale is freely accessible for non-commercial academic research and scholarly dissertations under academic fair-use guidelines, provided appropriate citation is given to the authors and the APA. Commercial assessments, corporate diagnostic platforms, and fee-for-service consulting applications require formal reprint permission and licensing agreements via the APA Rights and Permissions Office.

12. References

• Eisenberger, R., Fasolo, P., & Davis-LaMastro, V. (1990). Perceived organizational support and employee diligence, commitment, and innovation. Journal of Applied Psychology, 75(1), 51–59. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.75.1.51
• Eisenberger, R., Huntington, R., Hutchison, S., & Sowa, D. (1986). Perceived organizational support. Journal of Applied Psychology, 71(3), 500–507. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.71.3.500
• Eisenberger, R., Rhoades, L., & Cameron, J. (1999). Does pay for performance increase or decrease self-determination and intrinsic motivation? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(5), 1026–1040. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.77.5.1026
• Rhoades, L., & Eisenberger, R. (2002). Perceived organizational support: A review of the literature. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87(4), 698–714. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.87.4.698
• Smith, C. S., & Brannick, M. T. (1990). A role and expectancy model of occupational stress and well-being. Journal of Social Behavior and Personality, 5(6), 579–604.
• Vroom, V. H. (1964). Work and motivation. John Wiley & Sons.

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)