L’habilitation individuelle au travail : validation d’une mesure d’habilitation comportementale et vérification du rôle de trois facteurs de l’environnement de travail

Since the concept of empowerment was introduced in the world of work, it quickly became fashionable due to its anticipated benefits for the organizations and the workers. However, although the state of psychological empowerment of workers, as well as its antecedents, are well documented (Seibert, Wang, & Courtright, 2011), there are few tools to assess behavioral empowerment. This reality undermines the efforts of organizations trying to implement employee empowerment programs and of those that wish to measure their behavioral effects. In 2006, Boudrias and Savoie began the work to address this gap by creating a framework of behavioral empowerment at work that consists of two distinct approaches, namely the “emerging approach” (discretionary behaviors) and the “structural approach” (involvement in work management). They also created the first questionnaire enabled to measure the emergent approach (Boudrias & Savoie, 2006). This thesis aims to pursue their work by creating a questionnaire to measure the second approach and by continuing validation of the concept of behavioral empowerment.  More specifically, this thesis aims to: a) validate a questionnaire to measure employee involvement in managing their work in two versions, namely a self-reported version and one version for superior; b) establish the factorial structure of behavioral empowerment using the two approaches; c) verify the specificity of the construct of behavioral empowerment by comparing it to other related measures (e.g., organizational citizenship behaviors, innovation behaviors, self-leadership and self-management behaviors), and d) verify a structural model including three determinants of the work environment, namely the style of supervision, peer support and decision latitude, as predictor of individual work empowerment, measured using a scale of psychological empowerment and scales for both behavioral empowerment approaches.  To do this, three separate studies were conducted with various workers and four samples were formed: three samples containing only self-reported data (N = 274, 104, 249) and a fourth sample that also includes data reported by the supervisors (N = 151). The result of confirmatory factor analyzes show that the structures of the scale of involvement in the management of work as well as the behavioral empowerment scale are consistent from sample to sample and in both versions. In addition, the psychometric properties of the scales are satisfactory. On the other hand, the results of the correlational analyzes indicate that measures of behavioral empowerment have discriminant validity in relation to measures of some related constructs. Finally, the results of path analyzes used to verify the anticipated structural model indicate that psychological empowerment acts as a mediating variable in the relationship between, on the one hand, decision latitude and superior management practices and, on the other hand, two approaches to behavioral empowerment. Meanwhile, peer support is not related to workers empowerment.

Keyphrases: Questionnaire, Employee empowerment, Behavioral empowerment, Psychological empowerment, Work environment