Scale library · HRM & organizational behavior
Perceived supervisor support: Rhoades et al. (2001)
Perceived supervisor support is the degree to which employees believe their direct manager values their contributions and cares about their well-being. Eisenberger et al. (2002) showed that employees read supervisor support as a sign of whether the organization supports them, and that it is linked to retention. The most common 4-item version comes from the short perceived organizational support scale of Rhoades, Eisenberger and Armeli (2001), replacing 'organization' with 'supervisor'. Le et al. (2025) used it with job satisfaction and organizational commitment to explain the performance of travel agency employees.
Cite the original, not the blog.
- Model or scale: PSS
- Constructs: 1
- Items: 4 (1 reverse-coded)
Original English items
Items marked (R) are reverse-coded: recode them before computing reliability or scale scores. Replace bracketed placeholders such as [system] with the name of the system, brand or organization you study.
Perceived Supervisor Support (PSS, 4 items)
| Code | Item wording | Reverse-coded |
|---|---|---|
| PSS1 | My supervisor cares about my opinions. | No |
| PSS2 | My work supervisor really cares about my well-being. | No |
| PSS3 | My supervisor strongly considers my goals and values. | No |
| PSS4 (R) | My supervisor shows very little concern for me. | Yes |
Response scale
7-point Likert scale (1 = Strongly disagree … 7 = Strongly agree), as in van Woerkom and Kroon (2020) and Ojo et al. (2022); Le et al. (2025) used a 5-point scale.
Recoding reverse-coded items: 1–7 scale: new score = 1 + 7 − score = 8 − score; 1–5 scale: new score = 1 + 5 − score = 6 − score.
Licence and permission
The items are published in academic articles and reproduced in open-access articles; we found no specific terms of use from the authors. Cite Rhoades, Eisenberger and Armeli (2001) and the article you took the wording from.
Sources (APA 7)
- Eisenberger, R., Stinglhamber, F., Vandenberghe, C., Sucharski, I. L., & Rhoades, L. (2002). Perceived supervisor support: Contributions to perceived organizational support and employee retention. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87(3), 565–573. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.87.3.565
- Henseler, J., Ringle, C. M., & Sarstedt, M. (2015). A new criterion for assessing discriminant validity in variance-based structural equation modeling. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 43(1), 115–135. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-014-0403-8
- Le, B. H., Duong, C. H., & Nguyen, G. T. (2025). Perceived supervisor support and its impact to job performance: Dataset from the hospitality industry in Vietnam. Data in Brief, 60, 111649. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dib.2025.111649
- Ojo, A. O., Fawehinmi, O., & Yusliza, M. Y. (2022). Survey data on the social, personal, and work resources associated with work engagement among knowledge workers in Malaysia amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Data in Brief, 40, 107690. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dib.2021.107690
- Rhoades, L., Eisenberger, R., & Armeli, S. (2001). Affective commitment to the organization: The contribution of perceived organizational support. Journal of Applied Psychology, 86(5), 825–836. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.86.5.825
- van Woerkom, M., & Kroon, B. (2020). The effect of strengths-based performance appraisal on perceived supervisor support and the motivation to improve performance. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 1883. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01883
Vietnamese translation
A Vietnamese translation of every item, with sample-size advice and studies that used the scale, is on the Vietnamese page for this scale.