Why Should We Care About Workplace Conspiracies?: Developing a Workplace-Specific Conspiracy Scale and Examining Its Organizational Relevance

Conspiracy beliefs are defined as a widespread and stable way of thinking that expresses the tendency of individuals to explain social and institutional events as processes deliberately planned by powerful actors in line with secret intentions. Current literature shows that conspiracy beliefs are not merely reactions to specific narratives; instead, they reflect a broader pattern of mentality with cognitive and motivational foundations that can be generalized to conspiracy narratives of different contents. This way of thinking shapes individuals' evaluations of institutional actors, official explanations, and social arrangements by highlighting attributions of intent and secrecy under conditions of uncertainty. In the organizational context, conspiracy beliefs are a manifestation of this general tendency in a smaller-scale and everyday context, encompassing perceptions that decisions, practices, and relationships within the organization are carried out in line with hidden agendas. In contrast, there is no universal measurement tool that treats organizational conspiracy beliefs as a generalized, scenario-free structure that covers different aspects of the organization holistically. The aim of this study is to develop a Turkish scale that aims to measure organizational conspiracy belief in a general and contextless way, based on its operational definitions in the literature; to test the validity of this scale through its relationships with psychological constructs that have a central place in the conspiracy beliefs literature, and to examine its connections with attitudes and behaviors that has a practical importance in the organizational context. All hypotheses are listed below in relation to description.