This paper studies the validity and reliability of Menon's psychological empowerment instrument in the Indian context. It examines the relationship between individual dimensions of psychological empowerment and affective and normative commitment. Empowered employees are hypothesized to exhibit higher levels of commitment. 235 software programmers completed the Menon's psychological empowerment and Meyer and Allen's commitment questionnaires. Perceived Competence emerged as the most dominant factor of psychological empowerment. Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) revalidated the framework proposed by Menon. Correlational analysis has revealed significant and positive relationships among the three components of psychological empowerment, affective commitment, normative commitment, and perceived commitment except that no significant relationship was found between perceived competence and affective commitment.

In recent years, the concept of empowerment has become a buzzword in management circles and gained prominence as an individual level initiative. It started in the era of employee involvement, symbolized by participative management, managerial practices such as employee self-management employees (Shipper and Manz, 1992) and sharing of power and responsibility among team members (Conger and Kanungo, 1988). "Yet, until recently, the literature has lacked consensus on a definition or operationalization of empowerment in the workplace" (Spreitzer et al., 1997). Spreitzer (1995) for the first time developed and validated a multidimensional measure of psychological empowerment in the context of work. Several empirical studies were conducted using Spreitzer multidimensional construct to measure psychological empowerment. Menon (2001) developed and validated another multidimensional measure of psychological empowerment "as a logical next step in the research direction suggested by Conger and Kanungo (1988)". Despite these multiple measures, very little empirical work has been done on empowerment. Furthermore, there has not been rigorous research on its antecedents, and its consequences (Menon, 2001).

A working definition of psychological empowerment can be proposed as follows: the psychologically empowered state is a cognitive state characterized by a sense of perceived control, competence and goal internalization. Empowerment is thus considered a multifaceted construct reflecting different dimensions of being psychologically enabled, and is conceived of as a positive additive function of these three dimensions.

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