The empowering leadership questionnaire: the construction and validation of a new scale for measuring leader behaviors

This payer describes the construction and empirical evaluation of a new sca le for measuring empowering leader behavior. Study One consisted of thoroug h interviews with external leaders and team members in three organizations. Behaviors elicited in the interviews were classified by researchers into e ight categories of leader empowering behavior and the Empowering Leadership Questionnaire (ELQ) was constructed to measure each of these categories. I n Study Two, the ELQ was administered to team members and leaders from two organizations. The results indicated that five-factors (Coaching, Informing , Leading By Example, Showing Concern/Interacting with the Team, and Partic ipative Decision-Making) adequately describe the data. In Study Three, we c ross-validated the scale in a sample from five organizations and the factor analysis confirmed the five-factor model. The ELQ dimensions were also com pared with behaviors measured by two well-established measures of leader be havior. The results indicated that the ELQ dimensions partially overlap wit h previously identified constructs, but that empowering leadership behavior can not be entirely accounted for by the earlier measures. Definitions and implications for the categories of empowering leader behaviors are offered . Copyright (C) 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.