Development and Validation of a Workplace Happiness Inventory for Sustainable Human Resource Management Among Corporate Employees

Employee happiness is increasingly recognized as a core condition underpinning sustainable human resource management in organizations, yet existing measurement instruments have a limitation in that they do not sufficiently reflect the workplace context. Building on a workplace happiness conceptual model (four dimensions—work, relationship, system, and culture—comprising 11 sub-factors) that was separately established through a literature review and expert Delphi surveys, this study aimed to develop and validate an inventory capable of measuring this construct in practice. From an initial pool of 125 preliminary items, two rounds of expert Delphi surveys refined the item set to 91 items, and a pilot survey of 122 respondents narrowed this further to 87 items. A main survey was then conducted with 580 corporate employees, and exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses yielded a final inventory of 85 items comprising four dimensions and 11 sub-factors (model fit: RMSEA = 0.048, CFI = 0.888). Overall reliability was very high (Cronbach’s α = 0.982), and criterion validity—assessed through correlations with existing happiness-related scales—was also confirmed to be adequate (r = 0.675–0.897, p < 0.01). Unlike existing instruments largely adapted from Western scales, this inventory incorporates system- and culture-level dimensions specific to the Korean corporate workplace context and complements existing K-ESG Social-area disclosure indicators, which do not capture employees’ psychological experience of institutional conditions. This inventory offers a valid tool for systematically diagnosing employees’ workplace happiness and can serve as evidence to support sustainable human resource management interventions.