Reducing psychosocial risks through supervisors' development: A contribution for a brief version of the “Stress Management Competency Indicator Tool”

With the recent changes in the world of work psychosocial risks are increasingly prevalent, causing work stress and physical and mental illnesses, which have a tremendous impact on public health and social participation. Supervisors' behaviour development was proposed as an innovative intervention that can reduce psychosocial risks. The “Stress Management Competency Indicator Tool” is one of the most important questionnaires that assess managers' preventive behaviour. However, its psychometric properties have never been evaluated and the length of the questionnaire (66 items) limits its practical applicability. The aim of this study was to contribute to the development of the questionnaire by providing psychometric evidence on a brief version of the tool focusing on the “Managing and Communicating existing and future Work” cluster of behaviours, which has been found to be the crucial one in terms of stress prevention. A questionnaire was administered to 178 employees of two Italian public organizations (a municipality and a hospital), measuring the supervisors' “Managing and Communicating existing and future Work” competency, and the affective well-being and work team effectiveness. The results showed excellent psychometric properties of the supervisors' behaviour scale and confirmed the expected relationships with criterion outcomes (affective well-being and team effectiveness). Overall, the factorial structure and dimensionality, the construct validity and reliability, and the concurrent validity of the tool were strongly supported by this study. We concluded that the brief version of the scale is a valid and reliable measure that can be easily used in practice and that can contribute to the development of research and practice on this topic. •Psychosocial risks can cause serious mental and physical ill health at work.•Supervisors' behaviour development is an innovative preventing strategy.•The SMCIT questionnaire evaluates such kind of preventive behaviours.•The length and lack of validity of the SMCIT limit its applicability.•We validated a brief version focusing on a subgroup of critical preventive behaviours.