Developing a Legal Literacy Scale for Human Resource Practitioners: Preliminary Psychometric Evidence from Malaysia's Manufacturing Sector

Abstract

Human resource (HR) practitioners translate employment regulation into organisational policies and decisions, yet the literature offers few context-specific instruments for assessing the legal literacy required for this work. This study developed and preliminarily validated a Legal Literacy Scale for HR practitioners in Malaysia's manufacturing sector. Scale development comprised literature-informed item generation, expert review, content validity assessment, face validation, pilot testing, data screening, exploratory component analysis, and reflective measurement-model assessment using partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM). Five subject-matter experts evaluated 35 initial items, five HR practitioners assessed face validity, and 30 HR practitioners participated in the pilot study. The main survey obtained 226 responses; 193 cases remained after screening. Exploratory analysis reduced the scale to 24 items. The retained structure comprised six first-order dimensions nested within three conceptual domains: Legal Consciousness; Proactive Compliance Practice and Ethics and Compliance Integrity under Legal Attitude; and Knowledge of Rights and Protection, Knowledge of Limits of Employer Authority, and Knowledge of Statutory Benefits and Working Conditions under Legal Knowledge. In the PLS-SEM assessment, outer loadings ranged from .692 to .925, composite reliability ranged from .835 to .914, average variance extracted ranged from .541 to .842, and all heterotrait-monotrait ratios were below .85. These results provide preliminary evidence of internal consistency, convergent validity, and discriminant validity. The scale offers a structured basis for diagnosing legal-literacy gaps in HR practice. Because the exploratory analysis and measurement-model assessment used the same purposive sample, independent cross-validation is required before the instrument can be treated as fully validated