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Giving Power to the People: Empowering Leadership’s Impact on Leaders’ Prosocial Use of Power
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Author: Trevor Foulk, U. of Maryland
Author: Nicolais Chighizola, U. of Maryland
Author: Oguz Gencay, Robert H. Smith School of Business, U. of Maryland
Author: Gilad Chen, U. of Maryland
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Leaders are given power with the hope that they will use that power to benefit their followers and the organization. However, research has documented that the psychological tendencies associated with power often motivate self-interest and the pursuit of one’s own goals. It is therefore critical to understand how to make leaders feel powerful in ways that will cause them to engage in prosocial behaviors towards others. The social distance theory of power suggests that feeling powerful increases social distance with others in a way that causes these selfish and antisocial behaviors. Integrating this perspective with the literature on empowering leadership, we posit that when leaders come to feel powerful via empowering leadership, their sense of power will make them feel more social closeness, rather than social distance, with followers which will subsequently promote prosocial behaviors directed towards them. We test our theoretical model in two experiments and a multi-source field study. Across three studies we find converging support for our theoretical expectations, and demonstrate that when leaders come to feel powerful via empowering leadership some of the negative and antisocial patterns associated with power do not emerge, but rather a more prosocial type of power is exhibited.
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Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
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Empowering leadership and employee creativity: The role of motivation and resource crafting
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Author: Yuan Cheng, School of Business, Renmin U. of China
Author: Guangjian Liu, School of Business, Renmin U. of China
Author: Zhipeng Zhang, China U. of Labor Relations
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Drawing from the componential model of the creativity process, this study investigated the mediating effect of employees’ intrinsic motivation, felt obligation and resource crafting behavior in the relationship between empowering leadership and employee creativity as well as the moderating role played by employees’ power distance orientation. Multisource data were collected from 235 members and their direct leaders in China, using a two-wave and time-lagged research design. Our results show that empowering leadership is positively related to employee creativity, employees’ motivation (including intrinsic motivation and felt obligation) and resource crafting behavior sequentially mediated this relationship. Besides, power distance orientation strengthens the relationship between empowering leadership and employees’ felt obligation. The contribution of this study lies in explaining how employee creativity is triggered by empowering leadership as well as its boundary conditions.
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Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
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The Relationship between Empowering Leadership and Task Performance: A Conditional Indirect Model
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Author: Dongseop Lee, Korea U. Business School
Author: Eunjeong Kwon, Arizona State U.
Author: Yongduk Choi, Chonnam National U.
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Despite the mounting interest in empowering leadership, empirical evidence for its relationship with employee task performance has been limited and inconclusive. Using an interactionist perspective, we investigated the relationship between empowering leadership and task performance by integrating the roles of employees’ taking change as a behavioral mediator and their trust in leader as an interpersonal moderator. The results, based on two-wave data from 196 Korean white-collar employees and their direct supervisors, showed that empowering leadership was positively related to taking charge, only when the employees’ trust in leader was high. Moreover, the indirect relationship of empowering leadership with task performance through taking charge was also conditional on the level of trust in leader. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
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Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
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The Role of Employees’ Regulatory Focus in Shaping the Effect of Empowering Leadership
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Author: Liyuan Li, School of Economics and Management Tsinghua U.
Author: Ying Zhang, School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua U.
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Building on regulatory focus theory (Higgins, 1997) and self-determination theory (SDT; Deci & Ryan, 1985; Ryan & Deci, 2000, 2002), the current research hypothesize that empowering leadership may trigger different motivational processes (i.e., intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation) for employees with different regulatory focus, and thus result in different perceived stressors for them. Expanding the literature of empowering leadership, the current research incorporates the largely neglected regulatory focus perspective. Using a two-wave survey, the hypotheses were tested in a sample of 294 employees. Results show both significant mediation effect of intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation between empowering leadership and employee perceived stressors. And employee promotion focus would strengthen the relationship between empowering leadership and intrinsic motivation, while prevention focus would strengthen the relationship between empowering leadership and extrinsic motivation. The results make contributions to empowering leadership literature by identifying how employees with different regulatory focus react to empowering leadership, and exploring the both positive and negative motivational process of empowering leadership on employee perceived stressors.
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Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
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