A regulatory focus scale for healthcare workers: Evaluation and validation

Area of Science:

• Organizational Psychology
• Management Science

Background:

• Previous research on regulatory focus primarily examined positive employee behaviors.
• A lack of validated regulatory focus scales hinders further research in this area.

Purpose of the Study:

• To validate the Wallace and Chen (2006) regulatory focus scale in the Malaysian context.
• To establish a reliable measurement tool for regulatory focus among Malaysian healthcare workers.

Main Methods:

• Literature review to identify core regulatory focus components and items.
• Expert panel evaluation and systematic sampling of 344 Malaysian healthcare workers.
• Partial Least Square-Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) for second-order formative construct analysis, assessing convergent and discriminant validity.

Main Results:

• The study confirmed that promotion- and prevention-focused dimensions are integral to assessing regulatory focus.
• Both dimensions are necessary; omitting either alters the fundamental nature of regulatory focus.

Conclusions:

• This research contributes by validating the regulatory focus scale, addressing a scarcity of such validation studies.
• The validated scale provides a robust tool for future research on regulatory focus in Malaysia.
• The findings underscore the importance of both promotion and prevention dimensions in understanding regulatory focus.