New 43-Item Scale Measures How Firms Practice Conscious Capitalism

Researchers in Brazil have developed and validated what they describe as the first multidimensional instrument designed to measure how organizations actually practice Conscious Capitalism, a management philosophy built on higher purpose, stakeholder integration, conscious leadership, and conscious culture. The new Conscious Capitalism Practices Scale, or CCPS, distills decades of scattered literature into ten measurable dimensions and 43 items, and its validation was published as an open access research article in the International Review of Economics.

The study, led by Ronaldo de Lucio with Maria Luisa Mendes Teixeira and Isabel Cristina Panziera Marques, addressed a persistent gap. Although Conscious Capitalism has attracted growing academic and business attention, the authors found no previously validated scale capable of systematically measuring the extent to which organizations adhere to its principles. Existing research had examined the concept in fragments: some studies probed its financial implications, others explored leadership in contexts ranging from luxury goods to professional sports, and still others applied the idea to brand authenticity or workforce-driven sustainability. None offered an integrated operationalization that would allow researchers to compare organizations, accumulate evidence, or monitor how these practices evolve over time.

To build the scale, the team used a deductive item generation method. They first combed the literature for every statement describing or recommending an organizational practice associated with Conscious Capitalism, collecting 198 statements from seminal authors including Mackey, Sisodia, Aburdene, Neville, and Schwerin. Statements containing more than one behavior were separated, producing 207 distinct practices. Two researchers then independently identified repetitions and overlaps, and by consensus removed 135, leaving 72 practices. These were grouped into ten conceptually distinct dimensions: Profitability, Long-Term Vision, Customers, Workers, Suppliers, Communities, Environment, External Stakeholders, Leadership, and Culture. Notably, the dimensions were not copied directly from the four general principles of Conscious Capitalism; they emerged from a theory-informed classification completed before any data collection, then tested confirmatorily.

The initial version contained 47 items rated on a six-point agreement scale, a format chosen because it does not compromise measurement quality. Before fielding the questionnaire, the researchers ran semantic validation with 20 evaluators drawn from the same target population as the main studies: professionals employed by public or private organizations in Brazil who had completed higher education. Expert content validation was not performed, the authors explain, because of the limited number of researchers with established expertise in Conscious Capitalism in Brazil, a limitation they acknowledge explicitly and address by grounding content validity in a rigorous theoretical review and item clarity assessment.

Data collection proceeded in two survey phases disseminated through LinkedIn. A pretest between December 2021 and February 2022 drew 144 valid responses from 3,070 invitations, and a validation phase between March and June 2022 produced 391 valid responses from 5,544 invitations. Sample size requirements had been estimated with G*Power software, and both samples exceeded the calculated minimums. The questionnaire included informed consent, responses were anonymous, and the system blocked multiple submissions from the same IP address. Careless responding was screened out by excluding records with missing values, respondents without higher education, and cases in which more than 76 percent of answers fell into a single response category.

The psychometric work combined two complementary analytical approaches. During the pretest, a confirmatory assessment of the measurement model was run in SmartPLS 4 using partial least squares path modeling. Four items failed to reach the recommended factor loading threshold of 0.70 and were removed, and the Leadership dimension initially missed the Fornell-Larcker criterion for discriminant validity but was retained because its reliability values were adequate and its indicators theoretically relevant. After refinement, all ten dimensions met the criteria for convergent validity, discriminant validity, and internal consistency, leaving the final scale at 43 items. The validation phase then applied a second-order confirmatory factor analysis in JASP with a robust ordinal estimator, and the fit indices were strong: a comparative fit index of 0.956, a Tucker-Lewis index of 0.953, a root mean square error of approximation of 0.059, and a standardized root mean square residual of 0.054, all within accepted thresholds.

All ten dimensions loaded significantly on the global Conscious Capitalism factor at p < 0.001, with Culture showing the strongest loading at 0.921, followed by Long-Term Vision at 0.887, Profitability and Customers at 0.897, Suppliers at 0.874, Leadership at 0.857, Workers at 0.805, Environment at 0.802, Communities at 0.778, and External Stakeholders at 0.712. The validation also produced instructive exclusions. An item proposing that leaders subordinate their personal interests to organizational interests was not recognized by workers as a defining practice of conscious leadership, while the empirically supported core of the Leadership dimension centered on treating people fairly and respectfully, deciding by consensus, leading by example, and committing to all stakeholders. In the Profitability dimension, claims that companies should communicate that profit is not their primary objective, or should undertake philanthropic initiatives without profitability intentions, were not retained; instead, the validated practice was pursuing profit without treating it as the primary objective or placing it above ethical conduct. An item about advising customers to buy competitors’ products when those genuinely meet their needs also failed to survive.

To test criterion validity, the researchers paired the CCPS with an existing measure of Organizational Dignity, chosen for its conceptual complementarity with Conscious Capitalism. Among the 391 validation respondents, 205 completed both instruments, forming the subsample for a structural equation model. The standardized path coefficient from Conscious Capitalism practices to Organizational Dignity practices was positive and statistically significant at 0.787, with the model explaining 61.7 percent of the variance in perceived dignity practices and an effect size of 1.622, far exceeding the conventional threshold for a large effect. However, the authors caution that the two constructs were not fully differentiated by the Fornell-Larcker criterion in this sample, indicating substantial conceptual and empirical overlap that must temper any interpretation of the structural relationship.

The practical promise of the CCPS lies in diagnosis. Administered to workers, it can reveal how a company’s practices are perceived across each of the ten domains, identify areas requiring strengthening, and support follow-up measurement of initiatives over time. The authors are careful about scope. The sample was a nonprobability convenience sample of Brazilian professionals with higher education, a group representing only about 20 percent of employed people in Brazil, and sectors such as commerce and agriculture were underrepresented. The study also did not control for the number of respondents per company, limiting how well responses represent specific employers. Future research, the team recommends, should replicate the scale across sectors and countries, pursue expert content validation, and further examine the boundary between Conscious Capitalism and related constructs such as Organizational Dignity.

Subject of Research: Development and validation of a multidimensional scale measuring Conscious Capitalism practices in organizations

Article Title: Measuring conscious capitalism practices: development and validation of a scale

Article References: de Lucio, R., Teixeira, M. L. M., & Marques, I. C. P. (2026). Measuring conscious capitalism practices: development and validation of a scale. International Review of Economics, 73(2), 44. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12232-026-00556-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12232-026-00556-8

Keywords: Conscious Capitalism, scale validation, organizational practices, psychometrics, Brazil, Organizational Dignity, structural equation modeling, confirmatory factor analysis, business ethics, sustainability, stakeholder theory, survey research