Adaptation et validation de la version française de l’échelle de leadership d’empowerment

Introduction

Empowering leadership has been identified in the academic literature as an antecedent to employees’ psychological empowerment. It is defined by Amundsen and Martinsen (2014) as: “the process of influencing subordinates through power sharing, motivation support, and development support with intent to promote their experience of self-reliance, motivation, and capability to work autonomously within the boundaries of overall organizational goals and strategies” (p. 3). This style of leadership has been the subject of numerous theorizations. Recently, Amundsen and Martinsen (2014) developed an integrative conceptualization and a scale for measuring empowering leadership.

Objective

This study aims to translate into French and psychometrically validate the empowering leadership measurement scale developed by Amundsen and Martinsen (2014).

Methods

To this end, the original scale was translated from English into French and then counter translated by five bilingual translators. The instrument was then administered to two independent samples of French employees. We explored and confirmed the factorial structure of the instrument with two independent samples (n = 184, n = 185). Finally, correlation tests were performed to verify the predictive validity of the instrument.

Results

The results indicate that the francophone instrument has a two-dimensional factor structure consistent with Amundsen and Martinsen's (2014) conceptualization. In addition, the French empowering leadership measure is significantly and positively correlated with psychological empowerment, LMX, organizational innovation behaviours and job satisfaction, confirming the predictive validity of the instrument.

Conclusion

These results suggest that the French version of the scale can be reliably used to measure empowering leadership.