A Concept Clarification And Scale Development Of Accountability

Management practitioner is always faced with a dilemma of whether or not to control their employee in organizations.On the one hand,consensus,compliance and fairness calls for more powerful regulate.On the other hand,too much manipulation leads to more Defensive Focus Tendency,less sensitivity to market opportunity and crisis,and thus even be trapped into arm ant's 'Death whirlpool',that is,everyone follows the established "norm",but none complete the task efficiently,brings about huge losses or overturn furthermore.Today the uncertainty is increasing,it is difficult for an organization to cearly define in advance 'what a individuals should do'.Thus,the control-based management mechanism does not guarantee the achievement of good results.Organizations need to make each subject have a concern for the final outcome,break the border,break through the routine,perceive actively,think actively and perform actively.In this context,accountability research becomes increasingly important.The research on the theory of accountability has long existed,springing from the 1980s,but it is still quite immature.Researchers have not yet reach a consensus of "what accountability means ",and even confuse the different perspectives.Unfortunately,there is no literature to effectively clarify this situation.On that account,this paper attempts to clarifying the connotation and extension of accountability on the basis of existing research,developing a scale of accountability behavior.Firstly,this paper reviews the literature of the past and finds that the research of accountability can be divided into three perspectives:mechanism,perception and behavior.On the basis of comparing that three perspectives,we put forward a new connotation of accountability.After then,we conducted semi-structured interviews of 20 employees,Implemented open coding drawing on the grounded theory,during which time,the text is labeled,conceptualized and categorized.And finally come up with two second-order dimensions:Self-evident accountability and Reactive accountability.At last,two independent samples were collected,including 285 preliminary test questionnaires and 506 formal test questionnaires,afterwards,exploratory factor analysis(EFA)and confirmatory factor analysis(CFA)were carried out by SPSS and AMOS statistical software respectively.Finally,we reached two subscales,that is,Self-evident accountability sacle(including 8 sub-dimensions)and Reactive accountability scale(single dimension).In the meantime,the reliability and validity of scales were also verified.This paper clarifies the misunderstanding of the research of accountability theory,and developed a measurement tool of accountability,which lays a foundation of future research.In addition,this paper has expanded the boundary of cognition of positive organization behavior by dividing accountability into two categories,which is both beneficial to the theory research and practice application of organizational behavior.