Organizational life cycle scales are widely relied upon by scholar and practitioners alike as a strategic tool to identify firms’ life cycle stages. However, little attention has been paid to verifying and validating the OLC measures despite the considerable amount of OLC literature. The purpose of this study is to critically examine the psychometric properties of the OLC scale proposed by Lester, Parnell and Carraher. Data were obtained from a sample of 174 Australian Chief Information Officers from different sized firms and different industries and analysed by the use of component-based structural equation modelling. Results showed that the five-stage OLC scale exhibits acceptable validity and reliability indices despite some minor weaknesses. Results also confirmed the validity and the generalisability of this scale to measure and identify OLC stages in different types of industries. Based on these results and the literature review, alternate items were developed as substitutes for the weak items and an agenda for future research on OLC measurement is provided.

组织生命周期量表被学者和从业者广泛用作确定企业生命周期阶段的战略工具。但是，尽管有大量的OLC文献，但很少有人关注验证和验证OLC措施。这项研究的目的是批判性地检查Lester，Parnell和Carraher提出的OLC量表的心理计量学特性。数据来自不同规模的公司和不同行业的174名澳大利亚首席信息官样本，并通过使用基于组件的结构方程模型进行了分析。结果表明，尽管存在一些小缺点，但五阶段OLC量表仍显示出可接受的有效性和可靠性指标。结果还证实了该量表在不同行业中测量和识别OLC阶段的有效性和普遍性。根据这些结果和文献综述，开发了替代项以替代弱项，并提供了有关OLC测量的未来研究议程。