Common Method Bias Remedies

Common method bias remedies are the procedural and statistical tools researchers use to detect and reduce the spurious covariance that arises when constructs are measured with the same method — typically a single self-report survey. Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Lee, and Podsakoff's 2003 review crystallized the problem, cataloguing the many sources of method bias and the design and analysis safeguards available, and it became the field's reference point. Because the same respondent, rating scale, and occasion can inflate correlations among unrelated constructs, method variance can manufacture or distort relationships that researchers then mistake for substance. The remedies fall into two families: procedural design choices that prevent method variance from entering the data, and statistical techniques that diagnose or partial it out afterward. Lindell and Whitney's marker-variable approach and Williams, Hartman, and Cavazotte's confirmatory-factor-analysis marker technique are the leading statistical correctives. Used together, these remedies make method bias a problem to be designed against and tested for rather than assumed away.