Adaptation and validation into Spanish of the Workplace Dignity Scale

Abstract

Introduction and objective: Workers contend with many threats while performing their daily routine that could undermine their dignity, such as denigrating comments from supervisors or co-workers. Denying workers’ dignity constitutes a direct threat towards their well-being. The aim of this paper is to adapt and validate the Spanish version of the Workplace Dignity Scale (WDS). Method: An instrumental design was executed in order to adapt the scale to Spanish with a Mexican population (N = 588). Following back-translation, three studies were conducted in which confirmatory factor analysis, correlations, regressions, and invariance analysis were applied. Results: The results showed that the Spanish adaptation conforms to the six-factor structure of the original scale and that organisational dehumanisation and workers’ self-objectification predicted dignity at work; with workers’ self-objectification being the variable that most strongly predicted workers’ dignity. Finally, we also evaluated measurement invariance comparing our data with the results of the original scale. In general, results indicated that even when the Spanish version of the WDS presented an adequate factor structure, its measurement presented different factor loadings and slopes compared with the measurement of the original scale. Conclusions: In general, we have an instrument adapted to the Mexican context that allows us to evaluate workers’ sense of dignity in the workplace.