Measuring the Quality of Work Relationships: A Critical Review of Survey Instruments

Relationship quality, or the subjective evaluation of the association between two or more interacting parties, is one of the most commonly-studied constructs in organizational research and is studied across many different relationship theories. Our review provides researchers with a one-stop source of the conceptual and methodological landscape of relationship quality across the organizational literatures so they can decide which scale is appropriate for their research. To that end, we initially identify measures of relationship quality across multiple research domains, and then narrow our focus to evaluate those measures developed for an organizational context. This review canvasses (1) conceptual issues with the operationalization of relationship quality and its nomological network; (2) item generation issues such as the orientation and foci of the measure; and (3) scale development issues such as reliability and validity assessment. Overall, we find disparity and inconsistency in the development and re...