Objective: Employment of older individuals becomes more important in demographic change. To identify organizational practices that foster the motivation, health, and performance of older employees in particular, an efficient, holistic assessment of relevant organizational factors is needed. The 80-item Later Life Workplace Index (LLWI) as well as the 29-item LLWI Short Form (LLWI-SF) provide such a measure and differentiate nine domains of organizational practices relevant to older employees. The LLWI has been applied in emerging research in various contexts and countries. However, both measures are too lengthy to be applied in large-scale surveys (e.g., Health and Retirement Survey (HRS)) or organizational screenings. Therefore, this study introduces the extra short form LLWI-XSF. It features nine single-item measures that each capture one LLWI domain to achieve a highly efficient instrument.
Method: Over several discussion rounds, an expert focus group deductively developed nine German and nine American-English LLWI-XSF single-items, one for each domain based on the respectivedomain description, indicators, and items from the original and short form. We collected data from older employees in two national samples to test both language versions for convergent, discriminant, criterion, and incremental validity. We estimated the external validity using a multiple cause multiple indicator (MIMIC) model.
Results: The results provide evidence for each item’s and the overall formative index’s validity. We present minor variations at the item and country levels.
Conclusion: We provide researchers and practitioners with a validated extra-short measure to efficiently assess all nine LLWI domains. This helps to gain a comprehensive understanding of all critical areas of organizational influences on later life work. The newly developed instrument is well- suited to enable comprehensive screening of organizational practices for older workers.