Overview
What this research program is and why it exists. The frame the rest of the work hangs on.
research / principia
Principia research
A source-graded survey of organizational measurement — predominantly the people side. Codifies constructs, instruments, items, measures, and meta-analytic effect-size tables into a queryable registry shared across the People Analytics Platform.
Why this matters
The portable claim — what this research lets you understand outside the surface domain.
Load-bearing organizational measurement is unevenly distributed across organizations and disciplines. The same construct gets measured five different ways across five different studies; effect-size tables live scattered through chapters of textbooks; high-quality instruments get reinvented in low-quality form because the original is paywalled or buried. Principia exists to give builders, researchers, and operators a single graded, sourced, queryable place to look — and to give the People Analytics Platform a canonical measurement vocabulary it can subscribe to. The methodology generalizes: source grading, statistical-metadata extraction into a shared schema, novelty verification before publication, queryable indexing — the same shape works for clinical psychology, educational measurement, marketing research, or any field where rigorous measurement is unevenly distributed.
Read first
The general-audience explainer is the entry point. Everything below is the drill-down.
Principia — overview
General audienceA source-graded survey of organizational measurement, output as a book + queryable database, rendered from one underlying registry. Outside-reader brief on what it codifies, why now, and how it relates to the rest of the portfolio via @measurement/core.
Read →Drill-down — full research surface
Seven-slot baseline. Forthcoming slots shown openly.
Methodology
How the work is done — instruments, protocols, the standards each report inherits.
Reports
The actual research findings — phased results, research-question briefs, applied analyses.
Construct-family roadmap
24 construct families across 6 tiers (foundational · derivative · composite · outcomes · adjacent/methodology · sequenced-from-queue), 0 remaining queued, 3 parallel threads (surveys · infrastructure · book draft). All 24 families now have a v1 survey draft as of 2026-07-05.
Engagement — construct-family survey
forthcomingFirst tier-1 family. Densest accumulated literature; serves as the methodology proof-of-method. UWES, Gallup Q12, MEI, JES, plus the Kahn-tradition qualitative work. Editorial MCP slice: /research/principia/engagement/ (PA-PRINCIPIA-01; awaits MF-PRINCIPIA-07).
Job satisfaction — construct-family survey
forthcomingTier-1, second in the queue. Long history; classic measurement-model debates (global vs facet; affective vs cognitive). JDI, MSQ, JSS, BIAJS, single-item global. Draft landed 2026-05-21 (~7,245 words, 58 FILL markers pending Consensus-MCP verification of foundational instrument-development papers + Mazzetti 2023 engagement→satisfaction r≈.60 promotion); held forthcoming until curator closes the FILL markers + the first EffectSize row promotes via `promote-effect-size` CLI.
Organizational commitment — construct-family survey
forthcomingTier-1, third. Tripartite measurement model (Allen & Meyer affective / continuance / normative) is canonical and well-tested. Includes the Mowday-Steers-Porter (1979) OCQ tradition and the Solinger et al. (2008) discriminability critique. Draft landed 2026-05-21 (~6,083 words, 41 FILL markers pending Consensus-MCP verification of Meyer-Stanley-Herscovitch-Topolnytsky 2002 + Riketta 2002 + Mazzetti 2023 engagement→commitment r≈.63 promotions); held forthcoming until curator close-out.
Organizational climate — construct-family survey
forthcomingTier-1, fourth. Clarifies the climate-vs-culture ontology and specific-climate variants (safety, service, innovation, justice). Draft landed 2026-07-05, grounded in a live registry extract; found the family's own named anchor instruments (OCDQ, Litwin & Stringer) are absent from the registry. Held forthcoming pending curator review.
Organizational justice — construct-family survey
forthcomingTier-2. Distributive / procedural / interactional / informational measurement model. Draft landed 2026-07-05; found the registry's justice graph ran a coarser pre-2001 3-facet model than the field's current 4-facet standard (since corrected — interpersonal and informational justice now split out). Held forthcoming pending curator review.
Psychological safety — construct-family survey
forthcomingTier-2. Edmondson (1999) tradition — a clean, single-instrument case. Draft landed 2026-07-05, deliberately short given the field's own tight scope. Held forthcoming pending curator review.
Perceived organizational support — construct-family survey
forthcomingTier-2. The SPOS (Eisenberger et al. 1986) family. Draft landed 2026-07-05; found a rich effect-size network but zero POS-labeled instruments (since closed — SPOS now registered). Held forthcoming pending curator review.
Work-related stress, strain, and burnout — construct-family survey
forthcomingTier-2. MBI, OLBI, BAT tradition; adjudicates the burnout-vs-engagement boundary (empirically distinct, moderately-to-strongly negatively correlated, not opposite poles of one continuum). Draft landed 2026-07-05; found zero MBI/OLBI/BAT instruments registered at the time (since closed). Held forthcoming pending curator review.
Leadership — construct-family survey
forthcomingTier-3. Transformational, transactional, authentic, servant, ethical, charismatic — disambiguates overlapping styles. Draft landed 2026-07-05; found transactional and laissez-faire leadership have zero instrument or evidence despite a directly relevant source paper already cited. Held forthcoming pending curator review.
Performance — construct-family survey
forthcomingTier-3. Task / contextual / counterproductive / adaptive performance. Draft landed 2026-07-05; found 'adaptive performance' has no construct id anywhere in the registry and 'contextual performance' evidence sits under the OCB construct instead. Held forthcoming pending curator review.
Organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) — construct-family survey
forthcomingTier-3. Heterogeneous taxonomy overlapping with contextual performance. Draft landed 2026-07-05; found the registry's '13 OCB instruments' were mostly mistagged via one handbook chapter (since corrected). Held forthcoming pending curator review.
Turnover (intent and actual) — construct-family survey
forthcomingTier-4, an outcome family. Draft landed 2026-07-05; the raw effect-size layer cleanly distinguishes intent from actual turnover (both well-populated with synthesized priors, contrary to an earlier draft claim that was itself corrected). Held forthcoming pending curator review.
Withdrawal behaviors — construct-family survey
forthcomingTier-4. Lateness, absenteeism, work-effort reduction. Draft landed 2026-07-05; found zero registry coverage for absenteeism/lateness specifically — a real sourcing gap, not a filtering artifact. Held forthcoming pending curator review.
Counterproductive work behavior (CWB) — construct-family survey
forthcomingTier-4. Adjacent to performance and OCB. Draft landed 2026-07-05; found zero instruments registered at the time (since closed — Bennett & Robinson's and Spector's CWB scales now registered). Held forthcoming pending curator review.
Psychological capital (PsyCap) — construct-family survey
forthcomingTier-5. Composite of hope, efficacy, resilience, optimism — a methodology case study in composite measurement. Draft landed 2026-07-05; adjudicated that the composite and its HERO facets were unreconciled in the registry (since closed — the full composite now wired to its facets, including a newly-split work-specific efficacy construct). Held forthcoming pending curator review.
Person-environment fit family — construct-family survey
forthcomingTier-5. Person-job, person-organization, person-supervisor, person-group fit. Draft landed 2026-07-05; found the effect-size layer cleanly distinguishes 4 fit sub-types while the instrument layer lumped them together (partially corrected). Held forthcoming pending curator review.
Work design / job characteristics — construct-family survey
forthcomingTier-5. JDS and WDQ traditions; foundational predictor variables for many other families. Draft landed 2026-07-05; found JDS fragmented across legacy ingests and WDQ (Morgeson & Humphrey) absent as an instrument (since registered). Held forthcoming pending curator review.
Innovation and creativity at work — construct-family survey
forthcomingTier-6, sequenced from the queue 2026-07-05. Found the registry does not empirically distinguish creativity from innovative work behavior — the same predictors drive both at near-identical magnitudes. Held forthcoming pending curator review.
Identification (organizational, occupational, team) — construct-family survey
forthcomingTier-6, sequenced from the queue 2026-07-05. Found the registry is effectively single-construct (organizational identification only) despite the family's three-target name. Held forthcoming pending curator review.
Trust (organizational, supervisor, team) — construct-family survey
forthcomingTier-6, sequenced from the queue 2026-07-05. Found the instrument layer and effect-size layer use completely disjoint identifier vocabularies, and several high-N 'organizational trust' findings may actually be mislabeled leader/coworker trust. Held forthcoming pending curator review.
Voice and silence — construct-family survey
forthcomingTier-6, sequenced from the queue 2026-07-05. Found the registry is voice-only in practice (zero organizational-silence coverage), and its own pooled voice-performance estimate may mask a sign reversal its source paper explicitly warns about. Held forthcoming pending curator review.
Workplace incivility, harassment, mistreatment — construct-family survey
forthcomingTier-6, sequenced from the queue 2026-07-05. Found the registry resolves to just 2 real constructs (incivility, abusive supervision); harassment and generic mistreatment have zero presence. Held forthcoming pending curator review.
Diversity climate and related workplace-experience constructs — construct-family survey
forthcomingTier-6, sequenced from the queue 2026-07-05. Found diversity-as-climate-perception is cleanly kept separate from diversity-as-team-composition in the registry, but the two are never cross-linked. Held forthcoming pending curator review.
Compensation justice and pay-related attitudes — construct-family survey
forthcomingTier-6, sequenced from the queue 2026-07-05. Intersects directly with AnyComp. Found pay level/structure/satisfaction distinguish cleanly by construct id but not by instrument; the field's reference Pay Satisfaction Questionnaire is still absent. Held forthcoming pending curator review.
Audience tiers
The same headline research surfaced four ways: peer-review, engineering, general audience, product.
General-audience explainer
General audiencePublic framing of the survey-as-instrument argument — what builders, practitioners, and researchers can do with a queryable, source-graded measurement registry that they could not do before.
Peer-review framing
Peer-review framingPositioning against the existing measurement-handbook tradition (Schmitt & Highhouse 2013; Borman et al. 2003) and the meta-analytic synthesis tradition (Hunter & Schmidt 2004; Cooper 2017). What Principia adds, what it does not claim to add.
Engineering critique
Engineering critiqueEngineering reviewer's lens — schema discipline, the ETL pipeline, the verification-log infrastructure, the hub-and-spoke @measurement/core story. How the registry is built and where it can fail.
Product implications
Product implicationsWhat the registry tells us to build next — on the People Analytics Platform, on Vela, in the toolbox/hub. Which constructs unlock which platform features once their rows exist.
Bibliography
Field positioning — formal references and literature maps grounding the research threads.
Literature map
Three-layer field orientation — measurement theory, construct-specific instrumentation, meta-analytic accumulations. Where Principia sits between layers 2 and 3 as the indexing layer.
Bibliography — BibTeX
28 foundational references — measurement theory, scale construction, meta-analytic methodology, tier-1 construct instrument-development papers, tier-2 derivative-construct anchors. Construct-specific bibliographies live inside each survey document; this file holds the cross-cutting methodology references.
Preregistrations & protocols
Studies and intervention protocols filed before execution.
Pipeline
What is running, what is queued, what is forthcoming.