Luxembourg Workplace Mobbing Scale [LWMS-5]

Analysis

The Luxembourg Workplace Mobbing Scale (LWMS-5) is a brief psychometric instrument designed to assess employees’ exposure to workplace mobbing, bullying, and harassment behaviors. The scale focuses on the frequency with which individuals experience specific negative interpersonal or work-related behaviors from colleagues, supervisors, or other members of the workplace.

The LWMS-5 consists of 5 items and was developed as a concise alternative to more extensive workplace bullying measures. Its short format makes it particularly suitable for inclusion in larger occupational health, organizational psychology, and workplace environment surveys without substantially increasing respondent burden.

The scale examines characteristic manifestations of negative treatment at work, including repeated criticism of one’s work, social exclusion or being ignored, assignment of unreasonable or inappropriate tasks, ridicule in front of others, and interpersonal conflicts with colleagues or supervisors.

An important feature of the LWMS-5 is that it assesses specific behavioral experiences rather than requiring respondents to identify themselves explicitly as victims of workplace bullying. This behavioral approach allows researchers to capture exposure to mobbing even among employees who may not personally label their experiences as bullying or harassment.

The original psychometric evaluation of the LWMS was conducted with approximately 1,500 employees in Luxembourg and examined Luxembourgish, French, and German language versions. Findings supported its essentially unidimensional structure and provided evidence of satisfactory reliability and validity.

Objective

The primary objective of the LWMS-5 is to provide a brief and systematic assessment of the extent to which an employee is exposed to workplace mobbing behaviors.

The scale can be used to identify employees or occupational groups who experience higher levels of negative interpersonal behavior and to investigate associations between workplace mobbing and variables such as occupational stress, burnout, job satisfaction, psychological well-being, organizational culture, and psychosocial working conditions.

The LWMS-5 may be particularly useful in organizational psychology research, occupational health studies, psychosocial risk assessments, and workplace well-being surveys.

The instrument should not be interpreted independently as a clinical or legal diagnostic measure for confirming the existence of workplace harassment. Rather, it provides a quantitative indicator of exposure to mobbing-related behaviors, which may be interpreted alongside additional organizational, psychological, or contextual information.

Scoring

The LWMS-5 consists of 5 items, each rated using a 5-point Likert-type frequency scale.

The original response format is generally represented as:

1 = Never
2 = Rarely
3 = Sometimes
4 = Often
5 = Almost all the time

A total LWMS score can be calculated by computing the mean score across the five items, resulting in a score ranging from 1 to 5. Higher scores indicate greater exposure to workplace mobbing and negative interpersonal behaviors.

The original validation study reported satisfactory internal consistency for the overall scale, with Cronbach’s α approximately 0.73. Similar reliability coefficients were reported across the Luxembourgish, French, and German versions, supporting the consistency of the instrument across different linguistic contexts.

Because of its brevity and predominantly unidimensional structure, the LWMS-5 is particularly suitable for large-scale surveys and studies in which researchers require a rapid but psychometrically supported measure of workplace mobbing exposure.

References

Steffgen, G., Sischka, P. E., Schmidt, A. F., Kohl, D., & Happ, C. (2019). The Luxembourg Workplace Mobbing Scale: Psychometric properties of a short instrument in three different languages. European Journal of Psychological Assessment, 35(2), 164–171.

Sischka, P. E., Schmidt, A. F., & Steffgen, G. (2020). Further evidence for criterion validity and measurement invariance of the Luxembourg Workplace Mobbing Scale. European Journal of Psychological Assessment, 36(1), 32–43.

Einarsen, S., Hoel, H., Zapf, D., & Cooper, C. L. (Eds.). (2011). Bullying and Harassment in the Workplace: Developments in Theory, Research, and Practice. CRC Press.

Leymann, H. (1996). The content and development of mobbing at work. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 5(2), 165–184.

Einarsen, S., Hoel, H., & Notelaers, G. (2009). Measuring exposure to bullying and harassment at work: Validity, factor structure and psychometric properties of the Negative Acts Questionnaire-Revised. Work & Stress, 23(1), 24–44.