Abstract
Positive attitude to service leadership is fundamental for the development of successful leadership qualities in the service-dominated economy. The purpose of this study was to examine the psychometric properties of the 46-item Service Leadership Attitude Scale (SLA) in Hong Kong. A total of 2,240 undergraduate students in Hong Kong (mean age = 20.44±1.64 years; 66.9% were female) completed a questionnaire containing the 46-item SLA and other leadership-related scales. The psychometric properties of SLA were assessed using confirmatory factor analyses (CFA), reliability analyses, measurement invariance tests, and convergent validity test. Previous exploratory factor analyses suggested a seven-factor model of SLA which was supported by CFA in this study. By adding an additional dimension (“Implicit leadership theory”) in the scale, the final eight-factor model with 46 items showed superior fit using CFA. Factorial invariance tests showed that the factor structure was invariant in terms of construct dimensionality, factor loadings, intercepts, and factor covariance across gender and subgroups split based on “odd” and “even” case numbers. Convergent validity tests showed that the scale scores were correlated with several leadership-related scales. The scale and subscales also demonstrated good internal consistency reliability. This study is the first scientific work to validate a measure of attitude to service leadership via CFA. It contributes significantly to the development and validation of measures of attitude to service leadership, particularly in the higher education sector.
Highlights
During the past decades, our economic and social structures have changed a lot because of the transformation of economic mode, rapid economic globalization, and technological advancement
According to Curran et al (1996), values smaller than 2 for skewness and values smaller than 7 for kurtosis can be regarded as having univariate normality of distribution. These cutoff values were adopted in the present study as criteria because they were used in different studies on confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) (e.g., Cooper et al, 2010; Perry et al, 2015)
Findings showed that the model fit was adequate for the original seven-factor 46-item model (i.e., Model 1) of SLA (i.e., SLA-SF-46E) [χ2(968) = 5956.81, p < 0.001, CFI = 0.91, TLI = 0.90, RMSEA = 0.048 (0.047, 0.049), SRMR = 0.04]
Summary
Our economic and social structures have changed a lot because of the transformation of economic mode, rapid economic globalization, and technological advancement. Up to the turn of the century, service economy had contributed more than 70% of the GDP in OECD countries, while manufacturing economy contributed only 20% of the GDP (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 2000). In the United States, service sectors contributed 77% of the total national GDP in 2017, while manufacturing sectors only contributed 12% (World Bank, 2017). The impact of service-dominated economy has been intensified by economic globalization and rapid-advancement of science and technology, which significantly reshapes and transforms organizational structures and behaviors and calls for the emergence of new leadership concepts and paradigms (e.g., Sartori et al, 2018)
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