A Job Crafting Perspective on Empowering Leadership and Job Performance

Abstract

Despite substantial progress in the empowering leadership literature, questions such as how and when empowering leadership affects employee job performance still need further investigation. We built and tested a model linking empowering leadership with job performance via job crafting and psychological ownership. Organizational tenure was theorized as a boundary condition for the effect of empowering leadership. Three- wave survey data were collected from a sample of 231 Chinese employees. Employee job performance data were obtained from company records. Job crafting included both expansion job crafting (seeking job resources and seeking job challenges) and contraction job crafting (reducing demands). Results from structural equation modeling analyses showed that empowering leadership was positively related to expansion but not to contraction job crafting. These relationships were moderated by organizational tenure such that empowering leadership was more strongly related to job crafting for employees with long organizational tenure than those with short or medium organizational tenure. Expansion but not contraction job crafting was positively related to job performance via psychological ownership. Thus, in this study, we advanced understanding of the underlying mechanism linking empowering leadership to employee job performance by drawing on the job crafting literature. Besides, implications of the findings for successful aging at work were also discussed.