First, you probably noticed that many of the items contain an extreme. “I have a best friend at work” or “At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day.” When the items are phrased like this, it is much more difficult to strongly agree (to give a 5 on a scale of 1 to 5). But this is exactly what we wanted. We wanted to find items that would discriminate between the most productive departments and the rest. We discovered that if we removed the extreme language, the item lost much of its power to discriminate.
