Scaling Managerial Respect: A Developmental Perspective

Abstract

In an examination of what employees considered to be characteristic of excellent managers, it was found that trust and respect dominated all other categories of managerial behavior. An instrument to assess trust and respect was constructed by using the Rasch model. In an examination of item difficulty estimates, it was found that the item content could be described in terms of a developmental model of supervisor-subordinate relationships. The present paper describes the construction and preliminary validation process for the instrument and offers a probabilistic hierarchical developmental model.