Introduction
This study focused on working conditions, the aim was to show the influence of a specific leadership, empowering leadership, on people perception of well-being and fairness at work. We especially studied the link between empowering leadership, organizational justice and psychological well-being of workers.
Empowering leadership is a leadership type that aims to give self-reliance and decision making power to the staff members. Organizational justice relies on how people estimate or perceive if procedures, wages, communications or relationships are fair in their own workplace. Finally, psychological well-being refer to the individual positives emotions related to his work.
The literature review permitted to underline three hypothesis, the first one suggests that the empowering leadership increases individuals well-being. The second proposes that the empowering leadership is positively linked to the organizational justice. The last one is about a potential link between empowering leadership and psychological well-being that goes through the organizational justice perception.
Method
These hypothesis were tested with three self-administrated questionnaires (N = 272). Empowering leadership was measured with twelve items (Yahia, Montani, & Courcy, 2017). Organizational justice was tested with twenty points (Colquitt, 2001). And finally, psychological well-being was measured with a 22 point’s scale (Gilbert, Dagenais-Desmarais, & Savoie, 2011). Furthermore, a section was added in order to measure socioeconomic variables (age, gender, occupation, degree, contract of employment, years of service, years of service on the workstation, size of the company…) on the studied sample. The questionnaires were transcribed on the platform Google Form and circulated by social networks and e-mails from February to April 2018. Obviously, people replied on a voluntary basis.
Results
We analyzed the data with the statistics software JASP and partially validated our hypothesis.
The results allowed to put emphasis on two correlational links. The first correlational link between empowering leadership and psychological well-being was positive and significant. It means that people who are empowered at work are more likely to have a better psychological well-being.
The other correlation link, also positive and significant, proves that empowering leadership allows people to perceive more justice in their organization.
However, the linear regression analysis was not able to show a combined effect of empowering leadership and organizational justice on psychological well-being. But a mediation analysis revealed that organizational justice perception plays a role in the link between empowerment leadership and psychological well-being. In other words, a portion of the link between empowerment leadership and psychological well-being goes through the perception of fairness in the organization.
Finally, The ANCOVA revealed that people around 53 years old and above have the best well-being level when an empowering leadership is applied.
This last result can be discussed, there is indeed a bias linked to the questionnaire execution way. This one was transmitted by internet and precisely on social networks or by e-mail. Nevertheless, a statistical study showed that people around 53 years old and above are in a category that does make less use of internet and especially of social networks than younger people (INSEE, 2018).
Discussion & Conclusion
Those results are congruent with the psychological literature, with some small nuances. These findings involve some implication for management and quality of life in the workplace.
Concerning implications, training programs could be created for managers in order to develop a corporate culture that comes to support the alliance between health and performance at work. Thereby, employees could be involved and committed in their work, and the organizational policy could be seen more positively. Finally, people should be less inclined to quit their job because they estimate their workplace to be fair.
Finally, this kind of results must be apprehended carefully because there is some negative effect of empowerment. In fact, self-reliance and decision making power add mental load and cognitive capacity are limited so it can increase workload.
In further study, it would be relevant to compare the effect of empowering leadership on two samples : employees and middle manager.
Words I have learned
Occupation = profession
Software = logiciel
Corporate culture = culture d’entreprise
Policy = politique
Workload = Charge de travail