Empowering leadership: A meta‐analytic examination of incremental contribution, mediation, and moderation

TLDR

Empowering leadership has attracted growing scholarly attention in recent years. The study conducts a meta‑analysis to examine how empowering leadership influences employee work behavior and its incremental effects beyond transformational leadership and leader–member exchange. The authors performed a meta‑analysis of 105 samples to assess the impact of empowering leadership on employee outcomes. The meta‑analysis found that empowering leadership positively predicts performance, organizational citizenship behavior, and creativity at both individual and team levels, with trust, psychological empowerment, and leader–member exchange mediating these effects, while knowledge sharing had no indirect impact.

Abstract

Summary The concept of empowering leadership (EL) has seen increasing scholarly interest in recent years. This study reports a meta‐analysis investigating the effects of EL on employee work behavior. On the basis of data from 105 samples, we found evidence for the positive effects of EL on performance, organizational citizenship behavior, and creativity at both the individual and team levels. We further examined these relationships by exploring potential boundary conditions and the incremental contribution of EL over transformational leadership and leader–member exchange. Furthermore, at the individual level, both trust in leader and psychological empowerment mediated the relationships of EL with task performance, organizational citizenship behavior, and creativity. We also found evidence that leader–member exchange was a significant mediator between EL and task performance. At the team level, empowerment mediated the effects of EL on team performance, whereas knowledge sharing showed no significant indirect effect. Our results have important theoretical and practical implications and suggest some areas that require further research.