Bureaucratic Receptiveness: Construct Development and Scale Validation

Abstract: This paper introduces a novel construct, bureaucratic receptiveness, which captures individuals’ attitude toward bureaucracy. We develop and validate a concise, 6-item unidimensional scale to measure bureaucratic receptiveness, demonstrating its strong reliability across four studies. We establish the scale’s nomological validity and provide evidence of predictive validity, revealing that bureaucratic receptiveness predicts outcomes such as individuals’ favorability towards bureaucratic organizations and support for bureaucratic services. Importantly, we find that attitudes toward bureaucracy differ significantly from attitudes toward administration, with each construct independently predicting distinct outcomes. This underscores the critical importance of precise wording of attitude objects in scale development. Using “bureaucracy” rather than “administration” as the focal object of measurement yields more targeted insights into attitudes specifically tied to bureaucratic systems. We discuss the implications of this work for organizational research, public administration, and behavioral science, offering directions for future studies to further explore and apply this novel construct.

Keywords: Personality, individual differences, perception, attribution