An Alternative to the Likert Scale When Polling Employees

Abstract

The input from employees is a crucial source of information for strategic decision-making in organizations. The Likert scale is the scale most often used for employee polls but results in a variety of biases - including socially acceptable answers – influencing the overall scores. Hence, to offer an alternative, we improved a Guttman scale specifically for employee polling (Guttman-Poll).  This improvement asks employees about verifiable facts and -behavior, taps actual situation and the employees' ambition, caters to target setting, and provides additional managerial insights into, e.g., organizational alignment and knowledge sharing. We compared this scale to a Likert scale in 5 different employee polls. The answers following a Likert scale were normally distributed but were significantly more biased to the higher end of the scale: almost 80% of questions scored higher than five on a scale from zero to ten.  The answers on the Guttman-Poll scale were normally distributed across the entire scale. The Guttman-Poll scale delivers relatively noise-free input (tallying verifiable facts/-behavior rather than averaging opinions), which may drive algorithms and A.I.