Tell me Why: The Attributional Styles at Work Questionnaire and its Relationship with Affectivity, Personality, and...

Although attribution theory remains central to organizational science, most existing instruments originate in clinical psychology, rely on hypothetical vignettes, and exhibit notable psychometric shortcomings. To address these deficiencies, we introduce the Attributional Styles at Work Questionnaire (ASWQ), a measure grounded in realistic, empirically grounded work events. Informed by a systematic review that identified the occupational situations most likely to trigger attributional processing, the ASWQ samples this content domain comprehensively, thereby ensuring contextual relevance and providing initial evidence of content validity. Across independent employee samples drawn from distinct cultural contexts, sequential exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses produced a replicable, theoretically coherent factor structure with satisfactory reliability coefficients, supporting the instrument's internal validity. The ASWQ assesses responses to positive and negative work events along two core attributional dimensions (i.e., locus of causality and stability). As predicted, optimistic versus pessimistic attributional styles correlated meaningfully with positive/negative affectivity, the Big Five personality traits, and self-determined work motivation, providing validity in relation to these established measures. Moreover, the findings reveal nuanced attribution patterns for negative events across work domains, challenging a simple valence-based dichotomy. By clarifying the cognitive processes that shape employee behavior, the ASWQ positions workplace attributions as a pivotal construct for advancing organizational research and practice.