Recently, the business world has shown an increased interest in empowerment and work stress that matches researchers work, such as stress work. However, to date the impact of managerial behaviours on stress hasn’t been tested considering the influence of the very personal perception of these behaviours, which is called psychological empowerment (PE).
This paper questions the relationship between managerial behaviours with desire and perceived ability an employee has if its own ability to make a difference within its organization. The reflexion goes beyond that first statement and the second purpose of this research is to precisely interrogate the consequences past the job performance increasement: examine the impact on perceived stress. Three hypotheses were made. The first one states that each dimension of Leadership Empowering Behaviours (LEB) significantly contributes at the psychological empowerment global score increasement. The second one states that Psychological empowerment is a mediator of the LEB – stress relationship. The last one proposes that each LEB’s dimension has an effect on stress that is mediated by psychological empowerment dimensions.
A questionnaire was designed to measure the previous theoretical constructs. The 122 participants in this study were recruited by sharing the questionnaire’s link to firms without any filter. The subjects were only rejected if they were not working in their jobs for six month or if they were freelance. A major advantage of that choice is that they were influenced by their job’s managerial conditions.
The design of the questionnaire was based on three different ones. The first was the Leadership Empowering Behaviors (Chénard-Poirier, 2017), the second measured the psychological empowerment and was Spreitzer’s (1995), the last one for stress was the PSS10 (Karmarck and Cohen, 2000).
All analysis were carried out using Jamovi and Jasp. The first hypothesis was tested by conducting a linear regression on PE’s dimensions. Interestingly, there was a significant contribution of the delegation and coaching but the recognition dimension wasn’t significant. Using the “med-mod” module of Jamovi, psychological empowerment was significantly reported as a mediator of the LEB – Stress relationship. The striking outcome that emerges is the mediation’s nature, which is total. For the last hypothesis, no evidence was found on the dimension’s mediation’s role.
To conclude these analyses showed that even if there is a strong negative correlation between leadership empowering behaviours and stress, if you consider psychological empowerment as a mediator then this correlation isn’t statistically verified anymore. The mediation is total. That means psychological empowerment can be considered as an individual perception of the managerial behaviours that fully determines the impact of them. In other words, you can’t simply apply standardized behaviours and procedures to employees, a manager has to take care of each different perception that exists in his/her team.
These exploratory findings are limited by different facts such as using an internet questionnaire, or having dimensions that are too correlated within a questionnaire. Further work is required to establish the viability of these results was an experimental procedure.