The development and evaluation of a scale to measure occupational attributional style in the financial services sector

An individual’s attributional style, the characteristic way of explaining the causes of events, is related to motivational, performance and affective reactions. In the occupational field, an optimistic attributional style (i.e internal, stable and global attributions for good events and external, unstable and specific attributions for bad events) has been shown to be significantly correlated with job satisfaction, performance and success at work. However, the most commonly-used measure of attributional style, the attributional style questionnaire (ASQ), has poor internal consistency and its face validity for business applications is limited. This paper describes the development and evaluation of a domain-specific attributional style questionnaire: the financial services attributional style questionnaire. Two studies to assess the psychometric properties of the scale were conducted. Results indicated that it possesses good internal reliability, that the items cluster into two factors corresponding to the positive and negative subscales of the instrument, and that the positive subscale correlates with measures to which it should theoretically relate, namely motivation, learned resourcefulness, psychological strain and intention to quit. The paper is concluded with suggestions for further research.