Following the Ants: Development of Short Scales for Proactive Personality and Supervisor Support by Ant Colony Optimization

Employees' innovative work is a facet of proactive work behavior that is of increasing interest to industrial and organizational psychologists. As proactive personality and supervisor support are key predictors of innovative work behavior, reliable, and valid employee ratings of these two constructs are crucial for organizations' planning of personnel development measures. However, the time for assessments is often limited. The present study therefore aimed at constructing reliable short scales of two measures of proactive personality and supervisor support. For this purpose, we compared an innovative approach of item selection, namely Ant Colony Optimization (ACO; Leite, Huang, & Marcoulides, 2008) and classical item selection procedures. For proactive personality, the two item selection approaches provided similar results. Both five-item short forms showed a satisfactory reliability and a small, however negligible loss of criterion validity. For a two-dimensional supervisor support scale, ACO found a reliable and valid short form. Psychometric properties of the short version were in accordance with those of the parent form. A manual supervisor support short form revealed a rather poor model fit and a serious loss of validity. We discuss benefits and shortcomings of ACO compared to classical item selection approaches and recommendations for the application of ACO.