The Love of Money and Pay Level Satisfaction: Measurement and Functional Equivalence in 29 Geopolitical Entities around the World

Demonstrating the equivalence of constructs is a key requirement for crosscultural empirical research. The major purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how to assess measurement and functional equivalence or invariance using the 9-item, 3-factor Love of Money Scale (LOMS, a second-order factor model) and the 4-item, 1-factor Pay Level Satisfaction Scale (PLSS, a first-order factor model) across 29 samples in six continents (N = 5973). In step 1, we tested the configural, metric and scalar invariance of the LOMS and 17 samples achieved measurement invariance. In step 2, we applied the same procedures to the PLSS and nine samples achieved measurement invariance. Five samples (Brazil, China, South Africa, Spain and the USA) passed the measurement invariance criteria for both measures. In step 3, we found that for these two measures, common method variance was non-significant. In step 4, we tested the functional equivalence between the Love of Money Scale and Pay Level Satisfaction Scale. We achieved functional equivalence for these two scales in all five samples. The results of this study suggest the critical importance of evaluating and establishing measurement equivalence in cross-cultural studies. Suggestions for remedying measurement nonequivalence are offered

The love of money is the root of all evil: Pay satisfaction and cpi as moderators

By incorporating pay satisfaction at Level 1 and Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) at Level 2, we investigated the relationship between the love of money and self-reported corrupt intent among 6,382 managers in 31 geopolitical entities across six continents. Our significant cross-level three-way interaction effect showed that for managers with high pay satisfaction, the intensity (slope) of the love of money to corrupt intent relationship was almost identical in high or low CPI entities but the former had the lowest magnitude of corrupt intent, whereas the latter had the highest. For those with low pay satisfaction, the slope was the steepest in high CPI entities, but was flat in the low CPI entities and the difference between the two was significant