Most Loved Workplace® White Paper and Technical Documentation
A comprehensive validation study of the Most Loved Workplace® (MLW) audit as a predictor of organizational outcomes including employee commitment, innovation, and performance. Research by Louis Carter demonstrates the MLW scale achieves .95 reliability and strong criterion validity across multiple organizational and individual outcomes. When combined with the Big Five personality framework, predictive power nearly quadruples.
The Most Loved Workplace® (MLW) audit was developed and validated as a predictor of important organizational outcomes. Strong relationships were found between the MLW audit and employee commitment, innovation, and performance (both individual and sales). When combined with a personality measure, the assessments emerged as over three times more powerful than using a personality assessment alone. Therefore, there is statistical evidence that the MLW is reliable, valid, a strong predictor of key organizational outcomes, and works exceedingly well when packaged with a personality assessment.
The 14-item Most Loved Workplaces scale was tested with 300 participants (170 men, average age 37.8) in a comprehensive validation study. The scale achieved a coefficient alpha of .95, indicating very high interrater reliability. Alphas over .7 are considered acceptable, and thus the results of the study can be considered highly reliable.
Correlations between the MLW scale and self-report perceptions of an organization revealed strong relationships with key constructs. Organizational Commitment showed a correlation of .73, Organizational Citizenship Behaviors showed .37, and Psychological Safety/Freedom to Innovate showed .76 — all statistically significant at the .01 level.
Organizational commitment is defined as the individual's psychological attachment to their organization (Meyer & Allen, 1991). Organizational Citizenship Behaviors are a person's voluntary commitment within an organization that is not part of contractual tasks (Katz, 1964). Psychological safety is a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking (Edmondson, 1999), and is directly related to innovative behaviors. The MLW is strongly related to each, suggesting that individuals who score positively on the MLW will be higher in commitment, innovation, and OCBs.
The MLW scale also demonstrated strong relationships with individual performance outcomes. Performance correlated at .21, Likelihood of being Promoted at .37, Likelihood of Turnover at -.48, and Likelihood of Recommending the Company at .72 — all statistically significant. The negative correlation with turnover is particularly notable, indicating that employees who love their workplace are significantly less likely to leave.
Furthermore, the MLW scale showed strong relationships with customer-facing outcomes. Retaining Customers correlated at .52 and Attracting New Customers at .55. These findings offer strong support for the criterion validity of the MLW instrument, demonstrating high relationships with individual feelings towards an organization, individual performance, and client relationship perceptions.
Employee performance must be considered a two-part interaction between the individual employee and the company they work for. An employee who is motivated, able, and committed cannot achieve full potential without an organization that supports them. Conversely, organizations that create supportive environments cannot achieve maximum performance if employees are not motivated to excel.
To address this dual nature, Best Practice Institute (BPI) measured the MLW in conjunction with the Big Five Personality Framework. The Big Five has the most empirical support among personality measures (Costa & McCrae, 1992; McCrae & Costa, 1989), with over 15,000 scientific articles using it as the measure of personality.
Combining the MLW with Conscientiousness (the trait most relevant to work outcomes) as predictors of employee outcomes revealed dramatic improvements in predictive power. For Commitment, R-squared increased from .13 (Conscientiousness alone) to .57 (combined), a gain of .44. For Innovation, the increase was from .20 to .61 (gain of .41). For Performance, from .09 to .34 (gain of .25). For Attracting Customers, from .06 to .33 (gain of .27).
Across all five outcome measures, including the MLW instead of using only the personality measure on average almost quadrupled the predictive power of the assessments. This finding held consistent across all Big Five traits (Agreeableness, Extroversion, Neuroticism, and Openness), demonstrating that the MLW provides unique predictive value beyond individual personality.
Factor analysis using both scree plot and eigenvalue methods strongly argued for a single construct, with a single factor emerging with an eigenvalue over 1.0. This indicates that the MLW measures a single, coherent dimension: the degree to which employees feel connected to their companies.
The analyses above indicate strong support for a relationship between the MLW and key organizational and employee outcomes. Combining the MLW with a personality measure leads to increased predictive capabilities. Therefore, the MLW can be used either by itself, or in conjunction with an individual personality measure as a valid predictor of employee commitment, innovation, and performance, as well as attracting customers.
Methodology
The validation study included 300 participants (170 men, average age 37.8). The 14-item Most Loved Workplaces scale was administered alongside measures of organizational commitment, organizational citizenship behaviors, psychological safety, individual performance, turnover likelihood, promotion likelihood, company recommendation likelihood, and customer relationship metrics.
Reliability was assessed using Cronbach's coefficient alpha, yielding .95 — well above the .70 threshold considered acceptable for research purposes.
Criterion validity was established through correlational analyses between the MLW scale and established organizational constructs. All correlations were tested for statistical significance at the .01 level.
The Big Five Personality Framework (Costa & McCrae, 1992) was administered alongside the MLW to test the incremental validity of combining organizational and individual measures. R-squared values were computed for the MLW alone, each personality trait alone, and the combination with interaction terms.
Factor analysis was conducted using principal components analysis with eigenvalue and scree plot criteria to determine the dimensional structure of the MLW instrument.
Data Snapshot
{
"references": [
"Meyer & Allen, 1991",
"Katz, 1964",
"Edmondson, 1999",
"Costa & McCrae, 1992",
"McCrae & Costa, 1989",
"Barrick & Mount, 1991",
"Poropat, 2009"
],
"reliability": {
"nItems": 14,
"sampleSize": 300,
"coefficientAlpha": 0.95
},
"factorAnalysis": "Single factor with eigenvalue over 1.0 — unidimensional construct",
"customerCorrelations": {
"retainingCustomers": 0.52,
"attractingNewCustomers": 0.55
},
"performanceCorrelations": {
"performance": 0.21,
"likelihoodOfTurnover": -0.48,
"likelihoodOfPromotion": 0.37,
"likelihoodOfRecommendingCompany": 0.72
},
"statisticalSignificance": "All results significant at p < .01",
"organizationalCorrelations": {
"organizationalCommitment": 0.73,
"psychologicalSafetyInnovation": 0.76,
"organizationalCitizenshipBehaviors": 0.37
},
"combinedMlwConscientiousnessRSquared": {
"ocbs": {
"gain": 0.1,
"combined": 0.16,
"mlwAlone": 0.14,
"conscientiousnessAlone": 0.06
},
"commitment": {
"gain": 0.44,
"combined": 0.57,
"mlwAlone": 0.14,
"conscientiousnessAlone": 0.13
},
"innovation": {
"gain": 0.41,
"combined": 0.61,
"mlwAlone": 0.58,
"conscientiousnessAlone": 0.2
},
"performance": {
"gain": 0.25,
"combined": 0.34,
"mlwAlone": 0.05,
"conscientiousnessAlone": 0.09
},
"attractingCustomers": {
"gain": 0.27,
"combined": 0.33,
"mlwAlone": 0.3,
"conscientiousnessAlone": 0.06
}
}
}