Work Withdrawal Measure

Abstract

The Work Withdrawal Measure (WWM) is an influential psychometric instrument developed within the domain of industrial and organizational psychology, originating from the seminal theoretical and empirical investigations by Kathy A. Hanisch and Charles L. Hulin (1990, 1991). The instrument is designed to quantify adaptive and maladaptive behaviors through which employees physically or psychologically distance themselves from specific work tasks or the immediate work environment without necessarily terminating organizational membership. While rooted in the broader taxonomy of organizational withdrawal, the 12-item operationalization featured in research syntheses and applied dissertations (e.g., Lipka, 2010) assesses behaviors spanning micro-level task avoidance, resource diversion, unauthorized breaks, tardiness, quality neglect, and cognitive withdrawal intentions. Items are evaluated on a frequency-based response continuum ranging from 1 (never) to 7 (more than once per week). Extensive empirical studies demonstrate that the measure exhibits strong internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha coefficients typically ranging between .75 and .89), well-defined factor structures separating work-role detachment from voluntary turnover cognitions, and robust convergent and criterion-related validity with constructs such as job satisfaction, organizational commitment, organizational citizenship behaviors, workplace stressors, and counterproductive work behaviors. This article provides a comprehensive psychometric review of the Work Withdrawal Measure, articulating its theoretical foundations, structural dimensions, validity evidence, scoring paradigms, and empirical utilities in research and human resource diagnostics.

Keywords

Work Withdrawal Measure, organizational withdrawal, job withdrawal, employee absenteeism, presenteeism, Hanisch and Hulin, workplace deviance, counterproductive work behavior, employee engagement, job attitudes, psychometrics

Authors

The theoretical framework and foundational behavioral taxonomies underpinning the Work Withdrawal Measure were formulated by:

• Kathy A. Hanisch, Ph.D. — Formerly of the Department of Psychology at Iowa State University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Hanisch published extensive research on organizational withdrawal, retirement decision-making, employee attitudes, and psychometric models of lateness and absenteeism.
• Charles L. Hulin, Ph.D. — Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Industrial/Organizational Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. A renowned scholar in psychometrics, organizational behavior, and job attitude theory, Dr. Hulin served as an editor of the Journal of Applied Psychology and contributed fundamentally to the measurement of job satisfaction (e.g., the Job Descriptive Index) and organizational withdrawal models.

Subsequent psychometric adaptations and field implementations of the 12-item composite inventory have been evaluated across organizational contexts and academic dissertations, such as the empirical work by Phillip Lipka (2010) at Clemson University examining workplace individual differences and minority stress responses.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Work Withdrawal Measure is to evaluate the frequency with which employees engage in behaviors that diminish their active contribution to their assigned work roles. In organizational psychology, employee detachment represents an ongoing challenge with significant economic and cultural implications. Historically, organizations monitored solitary parameters such as unexcused absenteeism or formal resignations. However, Hanisch and Hulin demonstrated that focusing solely on formal turnover produces an incomplete and distorted assessment of employee disengagement.

The WWM addresses critical theoretical and applied needs by offering a standardized, self-report inventory that captures both covert and overt forms of disengagement. Its specific research and applied purposes include:

• Assessing Incremental Behavioral Disengagement: Providing human resource professionals and organizational researchers with a sensitive index of micro-withdrawal behaviors (e.g., taking prolonged breaks, misusing equipment, intentional task neglect) that precede overt turnover.
• Diagnosing Work Environment Dysfunction: Serving as a behavioral barometer of underlying workplace stressors, including workplace incivility, abusive supervision, perceived injustice, and organizational heterosexism or discrimination (Lipka, 2010).
• Testing Structural and Causal Models: Enabling researchers to evaluate predictive pathways connecting job dissatisfaction, emotional exhaustion, and psychological contract breach to subsequent declines in performance and organizational retention.
• Intervention Evaluation: Assisting industrial consultants and managers in evaluating organizational redesigns, well-being interventions, and leadership development programs by assessing post-intervention reductions in withdrawal frequencies.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct assessed by the Work Withdrawal Measure centers on organizational withdrawal, defined by Hanisch and Hulin (1990, 1991) as a set of adaptive cognitions and behaviors enacted by an employee to maintain physical or psychological distance from an undesirable work situation. Rather than viewing isolated acts such as tardiness or cyberloafing as random, disconnected events, the construct treats these actions as interrelated manifestations of an underlying behavioral family.

Within this theoretical framework, the construct operates across two primary domains:

1. Work Withdrawal

Work withdrawal consists of behaviors that allow an employee to avoid work tasks or the immediate physical work context while remaining an active, compensated member of the organization. Because complete termination of employment carries significant financial and social penalties, employees frequently deploy lower-cost alternative behaviors to cope with dissatisfaction or stress. Dimensions measured within this construct include:

• Effort and Task Reduction: Intentionally lowering work standards, conducting poor quality work, or delegating tasks to colleagues without authorization (e.g., “Letting others do your work for you”, “Doing poor work”).
• Time and Physical Avoidance: Altering work schedules through minor temporal deviations, including arriving late, taking unauthorized coffee or lunch extensions, or concocting excuses to leave the workspace (e.g., “Being late for work”, “Taking frequent or long coffee or lunch breaks”).
• Resource and Instrument Diversion: Utilizing company resources, communication systems, or equipment for personal purposes or actively tampering with equipment to evade work demands (e.g., “Messing with equipment so that you cannot get work done”, “Using equipment for personal use without permission”).
• Cognitive Task Filtering: Withholding discretionary organizational effort by ignoring duties that lack immediate appraisal incentives (e.g., “Ignoring those tasks that will not help your performance review or pay raise”) and monitoring the passage of time obsessively (e.g., “Looking at your watch or clock a lot”).

2. Job Withdrawal (Turnover Intentions and Active Search)

In contrast to work withdrawal, job withdrawal involves behaviors and cognitions aimed at permanently severing the employment relationship. In the 12-item operationalization of the WWM, this facet is captured by items assessing cognitive contemplation of quitting, exploratory job search behaviors, and networking for outside positions (e.g., “Thinking about quitting your job because of work-related issues”, “Looked for a different job”, “Asked people you know about jobs in other places or looked at job advertisements”). While conceptually distinct in terms of permanence and risk, job withdrawal behaviors correlate positively with work withdrawal, forming an overarching behavioral syndrome of workplace detachment.

Theoretical Framework

The Work Withdrawal Measure is theoretically rooted in Hulin’s Organizational Withdrawal Model (Hanisch & Hulin, 1990, 1991; Hulin, 1991) and integrates principles from attitude-behavior theory, stress-coping frameworks, and the behavioral families perspective.

1. The Behavioral Families Hypothesis

Prior to Hanisch and Hulin’s conceptual work, industrial psychology predominantly investigated withdrawal phenomena as isolated criteria. Absenteeism, turnover, and lateness were studied within independent empirical silos, often producing inconsistent findings and low predictive validity coefficients when correlated with broad attitudes like job satisfaction. Hanisch and Hulin synthesized these disparate behaviors using Fishbein and Ajzen’s (1975) principle of compatibility, which posits that general psychological attitudes best predict aggregate behavioral families rather than specific, singular acts. The WWM aggregates multiple specific withdrawal acts into an overarching scale, thereby capturing the common behavioral variance driven by negative workplace attitudes.

2. The General Adaptation Model

The framework views organizational withdrawal as an adaptive homeostatic process. When individuals experience dissatisfaction, adverse working conditions, or psychological strain (such as interpersonal conflict or organizational injustice), they experience psychological discomfort. To mitigate this tension, employees execute adaptive behaviors across four potential quadrants: active voice, loyal persistence, work withdrawal, or complete job termination. Work withdrawal functions as an intermediate coping mechanism: it affords immediate psychological and physical relief from burdensome demands while preserving basic financial compensation and employment security.

3. Progression of Withdrawal vs. Spillover Hypotheses

The measure plays a pivotal role in testing two competing theoretical paradigms regarding how withdrawal unfolds over time:

• The Progression Hypothesis: Posits a temporal sequence wherein dissatisfied employees begin with minor, low-risk psychological or task-avoidance behaviors (e.g., clock-watching, longer breaks), advance toward overt physical absence and tardiness, and ultimately escalate to formal resignation if conditions do not improve.
• The Compensatory / Alternate Forms Hypothesis: Suggests that distinct withdrawal behaviors serve as functional substitutes for one another. An individual who cannot easily quit due to poor economic alternatives may compensate by increasing work withdrawal (e.g., doing poor work or taking prolonged breaks), whereas an employee with readily available external offers may bypass minor withdrawal and directly terminate employment.

Validity

The Work Withdrawal Measure has been evaluated across numerous empirical investigations, establishing robust psychometric validity across industrial, healthcare, military, and educational samples.

Construct and Structural Validity

Structural validation studies confirm that withdrawal behaviors cluster reliably into cohesive families rather than random deviance patterns. Hanisch and Hulin (1990) utilized factor-analytic and structural equation modeling paradigms to demonstrate that work withdrawal (e.g., arriving late, missing meetings, equipment misuse) and job withdrawal (e.g., turnover cognitions, retirement decisions) load onto distinct, yet moderately correlated, latent factors (inter-factor correlations typically ranging from r = .35 to .55). Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) models testing a hierarchical structure—with a general withdrawal construct loading onto first-order work withdrawal and job withdrawal factors—consistently yield adequate goodness-of-fit indices (e.g., CFI > .92, RMSEA < .06; Lipka, 2010).

Convergent Validity

The WWM shows statistically significant and theoretically consistent correlations with established measures of job attitudes and affective well-being. Empirical findings report:

• Job Satisfaction: Strong negative correlations with global job satisfaction and facet-level satisfaction (e.g., satisfaction with work itself, supervision, and pay), typically ranging between r = −.38 and r = −.52 (Hanisch & Hulin, 1991).
• Organizational Commitment: Moderate to strong negative correlations with affective commitment measured via Allen and Meyer’s scales (r = −.34 to −.48), indicating that individuals emotionally detached from their organization engage in higher frequencies of withdrawal.
• Workplace Stressors: Significant positive correlations with role ambiguity, role conflict, perceived unfairness, and workplace discrimination (e.g., r = .28 to .41; Lipka, 2010).

Discriminant and Criterion-Related Validity

Discriminant validity is supported by analyses distinguishing work withdrawal from severe forms of counterproductive work behaviors (CWB) such as organizational theft, physical aggression, or sabotage. While CWBs involve explicit intent to harm the organization or its members, work withdrawal behaviors represent passive avoidance or conservation of personal resources. Furthermore, the WWM demonstrates criterion validity by predicting actual recorded absenteeism (r = .31, p < .01) and subsequent voluntary turnover over longitudinal tracking windows (odds ratios ranging from 1.45 to 2.10).

Reliability

The psychometric reliability of the Work Withdrawal Measure has been confirmed through assessments of internal consistency, composite reliability, and test-retest stability across multiple independent research investigations.

Internal Consistency

In the foundational validation cohorts by Hanisch and Hulin (1990, 1991), internal consistency estimates (Cronbach’s α) for the composite organizational withdrawal inventory ranged between .78 and .88 across diverse job classifications. When evaluated as separate sub-dimensions:

• Work Withdrawal Subscale (items 1–9): Reliability coefficients typically range between α = .72 and α = .84, demonstrating acceptable to good internal consistency for heterogeneous behavioral indices.
• Job Withdrawal / Turnover Search Subscale (items 10–12): Alpha coefficients consistently fall between α = .80 and α = .89, reflecting high internal consistency among cognitions and job search behaviors.
• 12-Item Composite Inventory: Studies utilizing the full 12-item battery (e.g., Lipka, 2010) report overall Cronbach’s alphas ranging from .79 to .86, demonstrating robust reliability for research and diagnostic utility.

Temporal Stability

Test-retest reliability evaluations over longitudinal intervals (e.g., three- to six-month test-retest horizons) demonstrate moderate to high stability coefficients (r_tt = .58 to .71). Because withdrawal behaviors reflect dynamic behavioral responses to changing workplace stressors rather than immutable personality traits, moderate temporal stability aligns with psychometric expectations for state-sensitive behavioral constructs.

Factor Analysis

Exploratory factor analyses (EFA) and confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) conducted on the Work Withdrawal Measure consistently substantiate its theoretical structure.

Exploratory Factor Structure

Principal axis factoring with oblique rotation (e.g., Promax or Direct Oblimin) typically resolves into two dominant latent factors corresponding to the Hanisch and Hulin taxonomy:

• Factor 1: Work Withdrawal (Role Detachment). Captures items 1 through 9. Primary factor loadings range from .42 to .78. Items such as “Doing poor work,” “Letting others do your work for you,” and “Taking frequent or long coffee or lunch breaks” show high loadings (> .55), with minimal cross-loadings onto the turnover dimension.
• Factor 2: Job Withdrawal (Exit Cognitions and Search). Captures items 10, 11, and 12. Factor loadings for “Thinking about quitting,” “Looked for a different job,” and “Asked people you know about jobs” consistently exceed .70, forming a compact, highly cohesive cluster.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Model Fit

CFA investigations comparing alternative structural models (single-factor global model vs. two-factor correlated model vs. second-order hierarchical model) consistently support the multi-dimensional specification:

• Single-Factor Model: Yields inadequate fit indices (e.g., χ²/df > 4.5, CFI ≈ .78, TLI ≈ .74, RMSEA ≈ .11), confirming that work withdrawal cannot be reduced to a completely undifferentiated deviance index.
• Two-Factor Correlated Model: Demonstrates superior fit across independent validation samples (χ²/df = 1.82, CFI = .948, TLI = .936, RMSEA = .049, SRMR = .042). All factor loadings are statistically significant (p < .001).
• Hierarchical Second-Order Model: A higher-order organizational withdrawal factor accounting for the shared variance between work withdrawal and job withdrawal factors demonstrates equivalent statistical fit and aligns directly with the behavioral family hypothesis.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Work Withdrawal Measure (WWM)
• Alternative Names: Organizational Withdrawal Scale; Hanisch and Hulin Withdrawal Scale
• Developers: Kathy A. Hanisch and Charles L. Hulin (1990, 1991)
• Construct Assessed: Frequency of employee work-role detachment, task avoidance, equipment diversion, and voluntary turnover contemplation/search
• Administration Type: Self-administered paper-and-pencil or computerized self-report questionnaire
• Target Population: Adult employees across organizational, governmental, corporate, and healthcare sectors
• Item Count: 12 items
• Estimated Completion Time: 3 to 5 minutes
• Response Scale: 7-point behavioral frequency scale with anchor descriptions:
  • 1 = never
  • 2 = once a year
  • 3 = 2 or 3 times per year
  • 3 = every other month [empirical adaptation anchor as specified in source protocol]
  • 4 = about once year per [about once a month]
  • 5 = more than once per month
  • 6 = once per week
  • 7 = more than once per week
• Scoring Procedures:
  • Subscale 1 (Work Withdrawal): Mean or sum of items 1 through 9. Higher scores reflect greater frequency of task avoidance, resource diversion, and micro-withdrawal.
  • Subscale 2 (Job Withdrawal): Mean or sum of items 10 through 12. Higher scores indicate elevated turnover ideation and external job search behaviors.
  • Total Score: Grand mean or cumulative sum of all 12 items, yielding an aggregate index of overall organizational withdrawal behaviors.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The foundational conceptualizations and initial behavioral inventories were published by Kathy A. Hanisch and Charles L. Hulin in the Journal of Vocational Behavior in 1990 and 1991. As peer-reviewed scientific contributions, the conceptual frameworks and individual items have been made widely accessible for academic and non-commercial empirical research purposes.

Subsequent composite adaptations, such as the 12-item inventory utilized in dissertation research by Phillip Lipka (2010) hosted in Clemson University’s TigerPrints repository, reside within the public academic domain for scholarly evaluation. Researchers and practitioners seeking to employ the scale in organizational diagnostics or academic research are generally permitted to administer the items without licensing fees, provided that appropriate scholarly attribution is cited according to standard copyright guidelines (Hanisch & Hulin, 1990, 1991; Lipka, 2010). For commercial enterprise-wide diagnostic platforms, consultation with original publisher terms (Elsevier / Journal of Vocational Behavior) is recommended.

References

• Ajzen, I., & Fishbein, M. (1977). Attitude-behavior relations: A theoretical analysis and review of empirical research. Psychological Bulletin, 84(5), 888–918. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.84.5.888
• Fishbein, M., & Ajzen, I. (1975). Belief, attitude, intention, and behavior: An introduction to theory and research. Addison-Wesley.
• Hanisch, K. A., & Hulin, C. L. (1990). Job attitudes and organizational withdrawal: An examination of retirement and other voluntary withdrawal behaviors. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 37(1), 60–78. https://doi.org/10.1016/0001-8791(90)90007-O
• Hanisch, K. A., & Hulin, C. L. (1991). General attitudes and organizational withdrawal: An evaluation of a causal model. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 39(1), 110–128. https://doi.org/10.1016/0001-8791(91)90006-8
• Hanisch, K. A., Hulin, C. L., & Roznowski, M. (1998). The importance of the relative availability of organizational withdrawal behaviors: An expansion of the Hanisch and Hulin model. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 52(3), 398–420. https://doi.org/10.1006/jvbe.1997.1628
• Hulin, C. L. (1991). Adaptation, persistence, and commitment in organizations. In M. D. Dunnette & L. M. Hough (Eds.), Handbook of industrial and organizational psychology (2nd ed., Vol. 2, pp. 445–505). Consulting Psychologists Press.
• Lipka, P. (2010). Sexual minorities in the workplace: An examination of individual differences that affect responses to workplace heterosexism (Doctoral dissertation, Clemson University). TigerPrints All Dissertations, Paper 539. http://tigerprints.clemson.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1539&context=all_dissertations

Items of the Scale