Being busy, feeling poor: The scale development and validation of perceived time poverty

• Published in: International journal of selection and assessment Vol. 30; no. 4; pp. 596 - 613
• Main Authors: Zheng, Xingshan, Zhang, Qi, Li, Xinxin, Wu, Bingqing
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.12.2022
• Subjects: Employees; freely disposable time; measurement; perceived time poverty; Poverty; Quantitative psychology; scale; Validity
• ISSN: 0965-075X; 1468-2389
• DOI: 10.1111/ijsa.12395

Employees across the world feel increasingly time‐poor. The advancement of management research on time poverty has, however, been stymied by the lack of a validated measure. We thus aim to develop and validate a measure of perceived time poverty, defined as individuals' perceptions of lacking freely disposable time. We generated the initial items with an inductive approach and examined the content validity of the scale with an item‐sort task. We then recruited four separate samples from different cultures to assess the psychometric properties (i.e., factor structure, reliability, convergent validity, and discriminant validity) and nomological network of a six‐item, self‐report Perceived Time Poverty Scale (PTPS). The results provide evidence of the psychometric soundness of the newly developed PTPS. We discuss the implications of our scale development and offer suggestions for future research on perceived time poverty. Practitioner points We develop a reliable and valid scale with which researchers can measure perceived time poverty and disentangle its causes and consequences. Assessing employees' time poverty is important because it is negatively related to well‐being and work engagement, which may further incur numerous financial and psychological costs for both individuals and organizations. Agreeable, extraverted, and less neurotic employees perceive less time poverty. Organizations could select such employees for positions with high job demands.