Felt Love at Work: Development and Initial Validation of a Multidimensional Scale Measuring Relational Experience in Organizational Life

Date of Award

2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Organization Development & Change (D.O.D.C.)

Department

Organization Development

First Advisor

Steven Cady (Committee Chair)

Second Advisor

Janet Lea Hartley (Committee Member)

Third Advisor

William O'Brien (Committee Member)

Fourth Advisor

Jari Willing (Other)

Abstract

Organizational scholarship has extensively examined expressed forms of care, compassion, and supportive leadership. Existing measures predominantly assess enacted behaviors or shared emotional norms rather than employees’ internal experiences of feeling genuinely cared for. Consequently, the receiver-oriented construct of felt love at work remains conceptually underdefined and empirically unmeasured within organizational contexts. Existing measures of felt love have largely been developed outside workplace settings and lack organizational grounding and dimensional specification. A multi-phase quantitative study addressed this gap through the development and preliminary validation of the Felt Love at Work Scale (FLWS), a multidimensional, receiver-oriented psychometric instrument designed to assess employees’ experiences of feeling genuinely cared for within workplace relationships. Felt love at work was conceptualized as the degree to which an individual feels genuinely cared for by others in the workplace and was grounded in interdisciplinary foundations spanning philosophical, psychological, biological, and organizational literature. Consistent with best practices in early-stage scale development, the study employed theory-informed item generation, expert review, structured card sorting, pilot testing, and exploratory factor analysis procedures. Data were collected from employed adults and analyzed using principal axis factoring with Promax rotation to examine latent structure and establish preliminary psychometric support. Findings supported a retained six-factor structure consisting of recognition, respect, affirmation, acceptance, affection, and loyalty. The final retained solution demonstrated strong internal reliability, substantial explained variance, and evidence supporting a multidimensional but interconnected structure of felt love at work. Additional analyses involving GLO suggested the presence of a broader higher-order relational experience characterized by emotional support, interpersonal care, mattering, and perceived value. By introducing the first workplace-specific measure of felt love, this research advances conceptual clarity in organizational scholarship. It provides an initial psychometric foundation for future investigation of antecedents, correlates, and outcomes of felt love at work. Findings further suggest that leadership research emphasizing enacted behaviors alone may capture only part of employees’ relational experiences within organizations.

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