Development and Validation of a Psychometric Scale for Assessing Interpersonal Competence of Managers

Pages: 301-309
Vinod Kumar Gupta (Department of Psychology, D A V P G College, Gorakhpur, UP)
A. P. Singh (Department of Psychology, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, UP)

The purpose of the paper is to present the processes undertaken to evaluate the psychometric properties of interpersonal competence scale (ICS), developed and validated for measuring interpersonal competence of managers. Interpersonal competence is an important variable that play pivotal role in different areas of human-life and to examine its importance in organizational milieu a psychological tool is necessary. This scale consists of 40 items before standardization. Responses were taken from 250 mangers of first level working in different subsidiaries of Coal India Limited (CIL), India using self-report measure method as a locus of measurement. Content and face validity, construct validity using exploratory factor analysis, and reliability analysis using Cronbach’s alpha correlation coefficient were used for validation and standardization of the interpersonal competence scale. Four items were dropped due to poor item-total correlation; five items were dropped due to less loading than .40 while two items were dropped because they were having cross loadings. The results of exploratory factor analysis revealed remaining 29 items are loaded on five factors (providing emotional support, conflict resolution, asserting influence, self-disclosure, and initiating relationship) and explain 48.6 % of total variance in interpersonal competence construct. The results of reliability analysis indicate that Cronbach’s alpha is .905 for standardized 29 items of interpersonal competence scale and thus reliability is good and acceptable for newly developed scale. Findings of this paper suggest that this interpersonal competence scale is a valid and reliable research tool which can be used to a wider population of mangers working in different organizations.