Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (3 items version): Translation and validation in Greek

Background: Measuring work engagement is essential to understand employee’s working conditions. Aim: To translate and validate the “Utrecht Work Engagement Scale” (3 items version) in Greek. Methods: Study population included 83 nurses in Greece. We performed our study during August 2024. We employed the forward-backward method to translate and adapt the “Utrecht Work Engagement Scale” (UWES-3) in Greek language. We examined the construct validity of the UWES-3 by performing confirmatory factor analysis. We examined the concurrent validity of the UWES-3 using the “Quiet Quitting Scale” (QQS), the single item burnout measure, and the single item turnover intention measure. We examined the reliability of the UWES-3 by calculating Cronbach’s alpha. We performed a test-retest study to evaluate reliability of the UWES-3. Results: The UWES-3 showed very good psychometric properties. Our confirmatory factor analysis confirmed the one-factor structure of the UWES-3. Concurrent validity of the Greek version of the UWES-3 was very good. We found a negative correlation between UWES-3 and QQS (r = -0.632, p-value < 0.001), single item burnout measure (r = -0.303, p-value = 0.005), and single item turnover intention measure (r = -0.299, p-value = 0.006). We found that the UWES-3 had very good reliability since Cronbach’s coefficient alpha was 0.924. Moreover, intraclass correlation coefficient for the total score was very high (0.995, 95% confidence interval [0.992 to 0.997], p-value < 0.001). Conclusions: The Greek version of the “Utrecht Work Engagement Scale” is a reliable and valid tool to measure the nursing practice environment.