Adaptación y validación al español de la Escala de Empoderamiento Psicológico

Abstract

El empoderamiento psicológico es un constructo de gran importancia en Psicología. Aunque existen diversos instrumentos de medida, el Psychological Empowerment Instrument de Spreitzer (PEI, 1995) ha sido tradicionalmente el más utilizado en el área de la Psicología Organizacional. Originalmente, este instrumento constaba de 16 ítems organizados en cuatro factores. Por ello, el objetivo del presente artículo fue la adaptación y validación al español del PEI, así como el análisis de su estructura factorial. Para ello, se llevaron a cabo dos estudios independientes. El objetivo del primero fue su traducción al español y su adaptación cultural en una muestra de 242 estudiantes universitarios para analizar la estructura factorial de los ítems y su fiabilidad. En el segundo estudio, se aplicó el nuevo instrumento traducido a una muestra de 317 trabajadores de una empresa de servicios con el fin de validarlo y comprobar la bondad del modelo, así como la validez concurrente con otras variables, tales como el empoderamiento estructural, el compromiso afectivo y la rotación, de la que se conoce su relación por estudios previos. El nuevo cuestionario resultante confirmó la estructura factorial original en cuatro dimensiones (competencia, significado, autonomía e impacto), aunque redujo el número de ítems (de los 16 originales a 13). El cuestionario adaptado al español obtenido tuvo, además, buenos parámetros psicométricos y de bondad de ajuste. El trabajo finaliza discutiendo sobre la relevancia del instrumento adaptado y sus posibles aplicaciones.

Psychological empowerment is a construct with a multifaceted character composed of four basic cognitions (impact, competence, meaning, and self-determination), which goes beyond a simple delegation of power. The impact of empowerment in different fields of Psychology has been important due to the proven relations maintained with other well-founded psychological variables in the scientific literature, and because of the positive consequences on the results and well being of people. Although there are different instruments for the measurement of this construct, the Psychological Empowerment Instrument (PEI) by Spreitzer (1995) has been traditionally the one most employed to measure the psychological empowerment in the area of Organizational Psychology, counting with more than one thousand publications, and articles as well as translations and adaptations to different languages. The original questionnaire elaborated by Spreitzer consists of 16 items organised in four factors following the four basic cognitions that were described above. Therefore, the aim of this article is the adaptation to Spanish, validation of the PEI, and to analyse its factor structure. In order to do so, two independent studies were carried out. The specific objective of the first study was to translate into Spanish and to adapt culturally such questionnaire. In the second study, the objective was to validate the resulting questionnaire and to analyse the factor structure and its goodness and with other psychological and organisational variables as well as the external validity in a sample of workers. In order to do so, in the first study it was carried out an inverse translation and adaptation to Spanish with a sample of 242 university students to subsequently analyse the factorial structure of the items and its reliability. The resulting translated questionnaire confirmed the factor structure in four dimensions (Competence, Meaning, Self-determination, and Impact), although the number of items was reduced from the original 16 to 13, which would explain the 74.08 % of the sampling variance. To confirm the psychometric characteristics of this new questionnaire, we performed a second study with 317 workers of a Spanish service company in order to analyse through confirmative procedures the internal structure of this new instrument, verify its adequacy and goodness of fit of the resulting factors as well as assessing the relation and external validity in a sample of workers and concurrency with other variables (structural empowerment, affective commitment and intention to leave), which are known to have a relation with psychological empowerment from previous research. From the application of this new questionnaire translated to Spanish into this sample of workers, we confirmed again the structure of 13 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 regression analysis we obtained positive and statistically significant results between psychological empowerment and other variables included in the study (structural empowerment, affective commitment, and intention to leave), testing the interrelations among them. Therefore, those people with a greater cognition on their empowerment developed a greater engagement and attachment towards the organisation, and consequently, their wish to leave was lower. Our study concludes with a discussion about the importance of the adapted instrument and its possible applications.