Development and Validation of Workplace Abusive Delegation Scale for Managers: An Exploratory Factor Analysis

Achievement of goals and organizational effectiveness has continued to suffer from abusive delegation by managers because a gap exists between delegation principles and what some managers actually do and there is no known study till date that attempts to empirically develop an abusive delegation measure. Using exploratory factor analysis this study develops and validates the abusive delegation scale among managers. Employing triangulation techniques, focused group discussion, and in-depth interview for superiors and subordinates across organizations, 123 positive and negative question items were generated and developed into a survey questionnaire using 5-point Likert scale for the study construct. Stratified, snowball and simple random sampling techniques were employed to draw participants from the study setting. The instrument was administered to 450 managers in the middle and senior level positions from public and private organizations out of which n = 341 managers participated in the study. Data was analysed using principal component factoring with varimax rotation to establish total-item correlations and exploratory factors. Three dimensions of the abusive delegation construct; (Skewed-delegation, authority-responsibility parity, egocentric-delegation), emerged with reliability values of between .71 and .92. Further evidence of the construct and criterion validity was established from the main study. Implications of this evidences are discussed.