Consulting Psychology Journal, Vol 78(1), Mar 2026, 66-90; doi:10.1037/cpb0000301
Employee surveys inquiring about job attitudes, such as job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and job engagement, are widely used by organizations around the world for action planning and developing interventions. Despite primary and meta-analytic evidence demonstrating the presence of a dominant general factor among attitudinal constructs (referred to as the “a” factor), practitioners typically analyze and report the results of the employee surveys in ways suggesting that specific attitudinal constructs are orthogonal to each other (e.g., sometimes the results would be reported at the item level; other times the items would be rolled up to scales corresponding to the aforementioned attitudes). Overlooking the role that the “a” factor may play in employee surveys may lead to overemphasizing the importance of specific factors, underemphasizing the role of the general factor, and consequently, to developing ineffective and incomplete organizational interventions. Using archival data from large-scale employee surveys as an example, we offer a step-by-step guide (tutorial) to practitioners, describing how to analyze and interpret the results of job attitudes surveys at both the individual and the organization level of data aggregation in light of a dominant general factor. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)