Developing and Testing an Instrument to Measure the Culture for Psychological Empowerment in Organizations (IMPEC)

Abstract. Psychological empowerment – the experience of competence, meaning, self-determination and impact at work – has become very popular in organizational research. Meta-analytic results show many positive consequences of psychological empowerment and many different antecedents such as positive leadership, high performance practices, and work design characteristics. However, scarce research is available on how organizational culture influences psychological empowerment. We believe a missing instrument is one reason for the underdevelopment in this field. For this reason, we developed IMPEC (Instrument Measuring Psychological Empowerment Culture) for measuring specific cultural values for psychological empowerment. IMPEC was tested in four studies. In the first study ( n = 208 German employees), the reliability, factor structure, and its relationship with psychological empowerment and affective variables were analyzed. The second study had two waves ( n = 182 German employees) in which the predictive and incremental value of the IMPEC for performance-oriented variables were evaluated. In the third study, the instrument was translated into English and validated in a US sample ( n = 346). Finally, a multi-wave study was conducted in a German setting ( n = 210) to test if the IMPEC could predict critical constructs better than the empowerment climate questionnaire.