Survey of Perceived Organizational Support

SPOS

businesspsychologyTerms not stated: check with the authors

Permission: Terms not stated: check with the authors. The developers publish no terms of use that Folio could find. Ask the authors or the publisher before using it in a study, and cite the original publication.

A measure of employees' general belief that their organization values their contributions and cares about their well-being. The original form has 36 items; shorter 16-, 8-, and 3-item versions are widely used.

Items

Version

1.0

Ready-to-cite methods sentence

Perceived organizational support was measured with the Survey of Perceived Organizational Support (SPOS; Eisenberger et al., 1986), whose original 36-item form had a Cronbach's alpha of .97 among 361 employees from nine organizations.

Citing this in a methods section? See the APA 7 guide (Author–date citations for psychology and the social sciences). Or compare all six citation styles.

Run SPOS in Folio Surveyor

Folio has verified the citation and methods for this scale, not its item wording, so Surveyor cannot add the items for you. It starts a study named for SPOS, with room for its 36 items; you add each item from the published source.

Start a study

Save SPOS Cite SPOS in a new doc

Reliability & validation

Notes

A single factor accounted for 48.3% of the variance in the original study.

Validation population

361 employees from nine organizations (Eisenberger et al., 1986, as reported by Worley et al., 2009)

Cronbach's α

0.97

Known limitations

The full 36-item form is long, so shorter 16-, 8-, and 3-item versions are common. Worley et al. (2009) note that most studies do not report which of the original items they used.

Original citation

Eisenberger, R., Huntington, R., Hutchison, S., & Sowa, D. (1986). Perceived organizational support. Journal of Applied Psychology, 71(3), 500-507.

https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.71.3.500

Questions researchers ask

What does the SPOS measure?

How many items does the SPOS have?

The Survey of Perceived Organizational Support (SPOS) has 36 items.

Is the SPOS free to use?

Folio could not find published terms of use for the SPOS. Ask the authors or the publisher before using it in a study, and cite the original publication.

Is the SPOS reliable?

Validation studies report Cronbach's α of 0.97. See the reliability section for the population studied and full statistics.

Who developed the SPOS, and how do I cite it?

Eisenberger, R., Huntington, R., Hutchison, S., & Sowa, D. (1986). Perceived organizational support. Journal of Applied Psychology, 71(3), 500-507. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.71.3.500

Or track new research mentioning SPOS as it publishes

Library entry verified November 2026. Metadata is provided for reference. Questionnaires are built in Folio Surveyor, subject to each instrument's licensing, and can be taken to Qualtrics, Google Forms or Microsoft Forms, with their CSV responses brought back for scoring.