Development and validation of the Work Conflict Appraisal Scale (WCAS).

BACKGROUND In the context of cognitive appraisal, the Work Conflict Appraisal Scale (WCAS) was developed to assess work conflict in terms of threat and challenge. METHOD In the first study, the factorial structure of the scale was tested using confirmatory factor analysis with a Spanish multi-occupational employee sample (N= 296). In the sec-ond study, we used multi-sampling confirmatory factor analysis (N= 815) to cross-validate the results. RESULTS The analyses confirm the validity of the scale and are con-sistent with the tri-dimensional conflict classification. The findings support the distinc-tion between the challenge and threat appraisals of work conflict, highlighting the im-portance of measuring these two types of appraisal separately. CONCLUSIONS This scale is a valid and reliable instrument to measure conflict appraisal in organizations.