Perceived Organisational Support Scale

What it measures

Measures the degree to which employees believe their organisation values their contributions and cares about their wellbeing. Based on organisational support theory — employees develop global beliefs about the extent to which organisations value their work and care about their welfare, and reciprocate with commitment, effort, and citizenship behaviours. POS is one of the most widely cited constructs in organisational psychology, with implications extending into consumer research through service-profit chain models — employees with high POS show higher job satisfaction, lower turnover intention, stronger customer service orientation, and higher emotional labour investment, all of which affect customer experience quality.

Response format

Likert (1–7, strongly disagree to strongly agree) — short form of original 36-item scale

Representative items

• The organisation values my contribution to its well-being.
• The organisation fails to appreciate any extra effort from me. (R)
• The organisation would ignore any complaint from me. (R)
• The organisation really cares about my well-being.
• Even if I did the best job possible, the organisation would fail to notice. (R)

Usage notes & scoring

(R) = reverse-scored. Score = mean. Higher = greater perceived support. The 8-item short form (Eisenberger et al., 1986) is standard for most research — the full 36-item scale is used when detailed profiling is required. POS predicts affective organisational commitment, organisational citizenship behaviour, and customer-directed service behaviour. Closely related to Perceived Supervisor Support (PSS, id:427) — POS captures the organisation-level; PSS captures the supervisor-level social exchange.

Recommended companion scales

Citation

Eisenberger, R., Huntington, R., Hutchison, S., & Sowa, D. (1986). Perceived organizational support. Journal of Applied Psychology, 71(3), 500–507.

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