Spanish adaptation and validation of the Psychological Empowerment Scale

Abstract

Psychological empowerment is a construct with a multifaceted character composed offour basic cognitions (impact, competence,meaning, and self-determination), whichgoes beyond a simple delegation of power.The impact of empowerment in differentfields of Psychology has been importantdue to the proven relations maintained with other well-founded psychological variablesin the scientific literature, and because of thepositive consequences on the results and wellbeingof people. Although there are differentinstruments for the measurement of thisconstruct, the Psychological EmpowermentInstrument (PEI) by Spreitzer (1995) hasbeen traditionally the one most employed tomeasure the psychological empowermentin the area of Organizational Psychology,counting with more than one thousandpublications, and articles as well as translationsand adaptations to different languages. Theoriginal questionnaire elaborated by Spreitzerconsists of 16 items organised in four factorsfollowing the four basic cognitions that weredescribed above. Therefore, the aim of thisarticle is the adaptation to Spanish, validationof the PEI, and to analyse its factor structure.In order to do so, two independent studieswere carried out. The specific objective of thefirst study was to translate into Spanish andto adapt culturally such questionnaire. In thesecond study, the objective was to validatethe resulting questionnaire and to analysethe factor structure and its goodness andwith other psychological and organisationalvariables as well as the external validity in asample of workers. In order to do so, in the firststudy it was carried out an inverse translationand adaptation to Spanish with a sampleof 242 university students to subsequentlyanalyse the factorial structure of the itemsand its reliability. The resulting translatedquestionnaire confirmed the factor structurein four dimensions (Competence, Meaning,Self-determination, and Impact), although thenumber of items was reduced from the original16 to 13, which would explain the 74.08 % ofthe sampling variance.To confirm the psychometric characteristicsof this new questionnaire, we performed asecond study with 317 workers of a Spanishservice company in order to analyse throughconfirmative procedures the internal structureof this new instrument, verify its adequacy andgoodness of fit of the resulting factors as well as assessing the relation and external validity in asample of workers and concurrency with othervariables (structural empowerment, affectivecommitment and intention to leave), which areknown to have a relation with psychologicalempowerment from previous research. Fromthe application of this new questionnairetranslated to Spanish into this sample ofworkers, we confirmed again the structure of13 items in four factors from the first study.Furthermore, we obtained good fit indexes(GFI, AGF, and NNFI), with values between.90 and.96. Additionally, through regressionanalysis we obtained positive and statisticallysignificant results between psychologicalempowerment and other variables included inthe study (structural empowerment, affectivecommitment, and intention to leave), testingthe interrelations among them. Therefore,those people with a greater cognition ontheir empowerment developed a greaterengagement and attachment towards theorganisation, and consequently, their wish toleave was lower.Our study concludes with a discussionabout the importance of the adapted instrumentand its possible applications