The STQ^© in statistical evaluation has shown acceptable reliability scores and has demonstrated content, face, predictive and discriminate validity. 

Factor Structure

The 1117 cases were subject to empirical analysis in an iterative fashion to identify latent factors, and their means and standard deviations.  Principal axis factor analysis was used to extract the common factors in the STQ.The oblimin rotation was selected because it allows the factors to correlate and STQ theory anticipates some correlation among sub scales. Factors were retained based on ( a) eigenvalues greater than 1.0, (b) only factors with two or more items loading at significant levels, (c) and items were attributed to a given factor if it equaled or exceeded 0.40 (Floyd & Widaman,1995). The analysis revealed a three factor solution as seen in Table 3. The results confirmed the construct validity of original STQ subscales. The strategic thinking scale that resulted from the PAFA is comprised of three subscales: systems thinking (8 items), reframing (5 items), and reflection (5 items).

Table 2 Pattern matrix from the principal axis factor analysis with direct oblimin  rotation for threer cognitive processes of strategic thinking

Extraction Method Principal Axis Factoring. Oblimin with Kaiser Normalization Rotation Converged in 5 iterations.   Values less than .10 threshold were suppressed. Scale Alpha .722.  Scale explains 53% of the variance

® = reverse scored items

Following the identification of the three factors, means and standard deviations were computed and are displayed in Table 3

Table 2 Means, Standard Deviation, and Reliability Coefficients of the Subscales of the Strategic Thinking Questionnaire.

The results for the confirmatory factor analysis are pictured in Table 3.

Table 4. Model fit for a priori single- and multilevel models

All chi-square values are statistically significant at 0.05. df=degrees of freedom, CFI=comparative fit index, RMSEA=root mean square error of approximation, SRMR=standardized root mean square residual. W=within-group portion of the model. B=between-group portion of the model. 

External Validity. The STQ appears to be generalizable to a wide spectrum of society. It has been administered and reported in six countries among undergraduate and graduate students and leaders and managers in for-profit and nonprofit organizations. In all but the earliest versions, essentially identical factor structures as those reported here were found. Item responses do differ as age, education, organizational role, experience levels increase.  Thus the instrument may perform differently based on the population studied.

Internal validity.   The STQ_v3 produced good internal validity. In 2005, Pisapia et. al. suggested that “the overall scale reliability of .91 and the high reliabilities for systems thinking, reflecting and reframing lead to the possibility that the scale is measuring one construct instead of three… .” (p.22). They suggested that larger sample sizes were necessary to perform a satisfactory factor analyses. Several such studies have been done. Pang and Pisapia (2010) reported moderate alphas from .68 to .79. Similarly Pisapia, Pang, Hee, Lin, and Morris (2008) reported alphas from .74 to .87. As seen on Table 3 above, this study reports alpha’s from .75 to .92 across three factors.  Rather than measuring one construct as originally believed the new scale appears to be measuring different strategic thinking skills.

Overall, item analysis indicated good convergent/divergent properties for items among the strategic thinking, reflection, and reframing subscales. Among these subscales, items correlated lower across subscales than within suggesting they are measuring individual constructs.   We found no significant threats to internal validity.

Convergent validity.  Convergent validity was established between the strategic orientation scale and Guglielmino (1977) self directed inventory and Bass’s (1998) Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire in previous studies (Zigna, 2008; Brennan 2010) and was not tested in this study.

Construct validity. This study produced three subscales that match the theoretical definitions posed by Pisapia, Reyes-Guerra and Coukos-Semmel in 2005. They defined reflection as the ability to weave logical and rational thinking with perceptions and experience to make judgments. The reflection subscale items reported above portray this ability; i.e., listening to intuition; connecting the dots; what am I neglecting to ask; what is so interesting, unique and important about this challenge. These items portray the strategic thinker as looking beyond the facts and reasons in an inductive manner to see ‘invisible’ influences in a situation.

In 2005, Pisapia and his colleagues defined systems thinking as the ability to see systems holistically, recognizing patterns and interrelationships. The systems thinking subscale items portray this ability; i.e., understanding how facts and people are connected; seeking underlying causes; extracting patterns; defining the entire problem before breaking it into parts. These items portray the strategic thinker as looking at the entire picture and then considering the important fundamental components.

In 2005, reframing was defined as the ability to switch attention across perspectives, frames and paradigms.  The reframing subscale items portray this ability; i.e., not ignoring past experiences and decisions when understanding current situations; finding more than one explanation, suspending judgment; seeking different perceptions. These items portray the strategic thinker reframing situations by looking at different viewpoints as opposed to one viewpoint or group opinion.