The Effective Followership Scale for faculty: Development and initial validation

Abstract

Abstract The followership among faculty in higher education institutions is inherently different from those among members of business organizations and other non-academic organizations. This article describes developing and validating the Effective Followership Scale (EFS), the first measure of followership behaviors for faculty, based on a theoretically and empirically grounded definition of followership. This article includes four studies. Study 1 was a qualitative analysis aimed at empirically confirming the definition of followership and developing an initial pool of items. Study 2 identified the initial factor structure using exploratory factor analysis. In Study 3, the confirmatory factor analysis was used to confirm the factor structure and to obtain evidence of convergent and discriminant validity, and the internal consistency reliability was analyzed. Finally, in Study 4, the scale validity was evaluated using criterion-related validity. A four-factor structure of the scale was supported by exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis of two independent samples. The EFS scores were significantly correlated with individual performance measures. The analyses presented herein show that the scale has good psychometric properties and is suitable for research purposes.