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The Unintended Consequences of Empowering Leadership: Increased Deviance for Some Followers

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Abstract

Integrating research on empowering leadership with the literature on power in social psychology, we examine how empowering leaders affect the propensity of followers to engage in deviance. Across a multi-source, multi-wave field study and a controlled laboratory experiment, we find that, compared to the followers of less-empowering leaders, the followers of more empowering leaders feel subjectively more powerful and engage in more deviant behaviors. Moreover, we find that the propensity of empowered followers to engage in more deviance depends on their prosocial attributes. Specifically, empowered followers engage in the highest levels of deviance when they have a weak moral identity and a strong desire for dominance. We further find that empowering leadership does not increase follower deviance when followers either have a strong moral identity or a weak desire for dominance. In sum, although past research suggests that empowering leadership may facilitate productivity and employee engagement, our work demonstrates that it can also cultivate harmful effects, such as increased deviance among certain types of followers. We discuss our theoretical contributions as well as practical implications for practicing empowering leadership.

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Notes

  1. The second-stage moderators moral identity and desire for dominance are stable individual differences that should not vary much over time. As the survey at Time 1 was somewhat long, we measured these moderators at Time 2 to create a more balanced experience for the participants.

  2. Results remained significant regardless if deviance is treated as an overall construct or separated into two different facets of deviance. We thus presented a composite score of overall deviance as the dependent variable for purposes of parsimony.

  3. All hypotheses remain supported without these control variables in Studies 1 and 2. Regression tables without the control variables are presented in the Online Appendix.

  4. We do not discuss the two-way interaction effects in Studies 1 and 2 because the three-way interaction term eclipses the two-way interaction effects both theoretically and empirically. That said, all two-way interaction effects are presented in the respective tables for Studies 1 and 2. We furthermore graph all significant two-way interaction effects in Online Appendix C.

  5. We conducted a validation study to ensure that our manipulation did not affect perceptions of micromanagement. One hundred participants from Prolific were randomly assigned to either the high or low empowering leadership condition and asked to rate a three-item measure of micromanagement adapted from Skiba, Saini, and Friend (2016; 1 = strongly disagree to 7 = strongly agree; α = .79). Results suggest that participants in the low empowering leadership condition did not view the leader as more micromanaging (M = 3.65, SD  1.18) than participants in the high empowering leadership condition (M = 3.40, SD  .95), t (98) = 1.15, p = .25.

  6. Results remained statistically significant when deviance is treated as a binary variable.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Ryan Fehr for constructive comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript. This research is supported by a Singapore Ministry of Education Tier 1 Grant (R-317-000-154-115) awarded to the first author and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Numbers 72072066 and 71572066) awarded to the third author.

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  1. National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Kai Chi Yam & Runkun Su

  2. University of Washington, Seattle, USA

    Scott J. Reynolds

  3. Huazhong University of Science & Technology, Wuhan, China

    Pengcheng Zhang

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Yam, K.C., Reynolds, S.J., Zhang, P. et al. The Unintended Consequences of Empowering Leadership: Increased Deviance for Some Followers. J Bus Ethics 181, 683–700 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-021-04917-x

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