New French-Moroccan Scale Brings Engaging Leadership Into Focus for Knowledge Workers

Leadership researchers have long argued that the way managers inspire, empower, and connect with their people can be measured as rigorously as any physical quantity, but the instruments to do so have rarely traveled well across languages and cultures. A new study published in BMC Psychology by Mustapha Nadifi and Amine Zenjari of the Research Laboratory in Management at the Institut Supérieur de Commerce et d’Administration des Entreprises in Casablanca now extends that measurement science to the Francophone world. The researchers translated and culturally adapted the Engaging Leadership Scale, a twelve-item questionnaire, into French for use in Morocco, and then subjected the adapted version to a battery of statistical tests among nearly three hundred Moroccan knowledge workers. Their results offer the first psychometrically evaluated French-Moroccan version of the scale, with strong evidence that it works as a global measure of engaging leadership, alongside a candid caution about interpreting its separate facets.

Engaging leadership is a relatively young construct in organizational psychology. It describes leaders who energize their teams through four interlocking behaviors: inspiring others through strong personal example, empowering employees by giving them autonomy and voice, strengthening the bonds within the team, and fostering a sense of meaning and alignment with organizational goals. The original Engaging Leadership Scale was developed in the Norwegian research tradition, and like most psychological instruments it carries the cultural fingerprints of the population in which it was built. Idioms about what makes a leader inspiring, or what empowerment looks like in daily work, do not translate word for word. That is why the field of cross-cultural adaptation exists: to ensure that when a questionnaire crosses a language border, it still measures the same underlying idea rather than an artifact of translation.

Nadifi and Zenjari followed the established, multi-stage protocol for this kind of work. The process began with forward translation, in which bilingual experts rendered the English items into French with attention to meaning rather than literal wording. A back-translation step then converted the French version into English again, ideally by translators blind to the original, so that discrepancies between the back-translation and the source could reveal ambiguities or cultural mismatches. An expert panel reviewed the material and refined the wording, and a pilot test with members of the target population checked that the items were comprehensible and natural in a Moroccan workplace setting. Only after this iterative polishing was the final French-Moroccan version administered in a cross-sectional online survey of 298 participants working in Moroccan public and private organizations.

The choice of knowledge workers as the study population is significant. These are employees whose primary capital is expertise—analysts, engineers, managers, educators, and professionals whose output depends on judgment and creativity rather than routine physical labor. Knowledge workers are precisely the group for which engaging leadership is hypothesized to matter most, because their motivation and discretionary effort are difficult to monitor and depend heavily on intrinsic drivers. Morocco’s economy, like many others, is shifting toward such knowledge-intensive roles, yet most validated leadership instruments in the country were imported without formal adaptation. A rigorously tested French-language measure fills a practical gap for human resource practitioners and organizational scientists working in Morocco and other Francophone settings.

The statistical heart of the study lies in confirmatory factor analysis, a technique that tests whether the pattern of correlations among questionnaire items matches a theoretical model of how the construct is structured. The researchers compared competing models, including a second-order hierarchical model in which the four leadership facets are treated as manifestations of one overarching engaging leadership construct. That hierarchical model fit the data reasonably well, with a chi-square to degrees-of-freedom ratio of 2.27, a Comparative Fit Index of 0.978, a Tucker-Lewis Index of 0.971, a Root Mean Square Error of Approximation of 0.065, and a Standardized Root Mean Square Residual of 0.029. For readers outside psychometrics, values of CFI and TLI above roughly 0.95 and an RMSEA below about 0.08 are conventionally considered indicators of good model fit, so these numbers describe a measurement model that reproduces the observed data closely.

Reliability, the degree to which the scale produces consistent measurements, was equally impressive. The overall twelve-item scale achieved a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.950, a figure that sits well within the range conventionally described as excellent. The four subscales each showed internal consistency coefficients between 0.821 and 0.903, spanning acceptable to strong. In practical terms, this means that respondents who answered one inspiring-leadership item positively tended to answer the other items in that facet consistently, and that the total score behaves as a coherent summary of a person’s perception of their leader. Reliability of this magnitude is a prerequisite for any instrument intended to be used in real organizations, whether for research surveys, leadership development programs, or internal diagnostics.

The study also examined measurement invariance across gender, a technical but consequential question. Invariance testing asks whether the questionnaire functions the same way for different groups: configural invariance checks that the same factor structure holds, metric invariance checks that items relate to the construct with equal strength across groups, and scalar invariance checks that items behave similarly at the same underlying level of the trait. All three levels were supported in this sample, meaning that men and women in the study interpreted and responded to the items in comparable ways. Without such evidence, comparisons of average leadership scores between genders could reflect measurement bias rather than genuine differences, so the invariance findings license meaningful group comparisons in future research.

Convergent validity was assessed by testing whether the new scale correlates with a related construct in the expected direction. The global ELS score correlated positively with work engagement, the well-studied state of vigor, dedication, and absorption in one’s job, with a correlation coefficient of 0.46. This is a moderate, theoretically sensible association: employees who perceive their leaders as engaging tend to report higher engagement with their own work. The finding does not prove that engaging leadership causes engagement—the cross-sectional design cannot establish causal direction—but it demonstrates that the scale captures something meaningfully connected to outcomes that organizations care about, rather than measuring statistical noise.

The authors are notably transparent about one limitation. The four factors of the scale correlated relatively highly with one another, which raises concerns about discriminant validity, the ability of the subscales to measure distinct facets rather than one undifferentiated construct. When facets overlap this heavily, a respondent’s score on one dimension is nearly redundant with their scores on the others, and facet-level interpretations—claiming, for instance, that a leader is strong on empowerment but weak on inspiration—become statistically fragile. The researchers conclude that the French-Moroccan ELS is more convincing as a global measure of engaging leadership than as a set of separate facet scores, and they advise that facet-level conclusions be approached with caution. This kind of honest boundary-setting is a hallmark of careful psychometric work, and it gives future users a clear map of what the instrument can and cannot support.

The broader significance of the study extends beyond Morocco. Psychological measurement has a replication and generalizability problem, and instruments validated in Northern European or North American samples often fail silently when exported to other contexts. By documenting every step of the adaptation pipeline and reporting fit statistics, reliability coefficients, invariance tests, and validity correlations in the open-access literature, Nadifi and Zenjari provide both a usable tool and a template for similar efforts across the Francophone organizational world, from North Africa to sub-Saharan Africa and beyond. For Moroccan organizations, the scale offers a scientifically grounded way to assess a leadership style increasingly linked to employee motivation and retention. For the international research community, it adds a new population to the growing map of engaging leadership evidence, helping to determine whether the construct is a universal feature of effective management or one whose expression varies with culture, language, and the structure of work itself.

Subject of Research: Cross-cultural adaptation and psychometric validation of the Engaging Leadership Scale in Morocco

Article Title: Cross-cultural adaptation and psychometric evaluation of the French-Moroccan version of the Engaging Leadership Scale among knowledge workers in Morocco

Article References: Nadifi, M., & Zenjari, A. (2026). Cross-cultural adaptation and psychometric evaluation of the French-Moroccan version of the Engaging Leadership Scale among knowledge workers in Morocco. BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05654-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05654-4

Keywords: engaging leadership, psychometrics, cross-cultural adaptation, scale validation, Morocco, knowledge workers, measurement invariance, confirmatory factor analysis, work engagement, organizational psychology, BMC Psychology, French translation