Investigating the effect of psychological empowerment on the internal service quality in female employees of the Ministry of Sports and Youth

Internal service quality and its influencing factors in sport context is a new topic in the management and leadership literature that limited research has been done on it. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of psychological empowerment on the internal services quality in female employees of the Ministry of Sports and Youth, Iran.

This study is a descriptive-survey research. The population of this study was all female employees of the Ministry of Sports and Youth, Iran of which 232 people were selected as the statistical sample. The tools included Modified Spreitzer (1995) Psychological Empowerment Questionnaire with five dimensions (competence, autonomy, impact, meaningfulness and trust) and Di Xie Internal Service Quality Questionnaire (2005) with three dimensions (individual, unit/department and organizational level). Data were analyzed by structural equation modeling using Smart PLS software.

Structural equation modeling confirmed the goodness of fit of the proposed model. The results showed a positive effect of trust (0.14) and competency (0.57) on the internal service quality at the individual level. The meaningfulness (0.16) and impact (0.41) had a positive effect on the unit-level internal service quality and also the effect of autonomy (0.24), trust (0.22), competence (-0.13), meaningfulness (0.17) and impact (0.20) on the internal service quality at the organizational level were confirmed.

According to the results, one of the methods to encourage female employees to engage in extra-role behaviors and provide high internal services quality is psychological empowerment.