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Who are the Empowered Employees: Those with High Work Performance or High Ethical Behavior?

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Abstract

Although empowering leadership is central to employees, leaders, and organizations, few studies have examined follower behavior and its role in incentivizing leaders to engage in empowering leadership. We use an exploratory, sequential mixed methods approach to explore comprehensively the influence of employee characteristics (i.e., work performance and ethical behavior) and leader-perceived threats on empowering leadership. We conducted two studies—the first entailed in-depth interviews of 24 managers from different industries to identify (i) the primary employee factors that determine empowering leadership and (ii) the types of leader-perceived threats. The five employee factors and three leader-perceived threats identified lay the groundwork for the quantitative research in the second study. We used leader–member exchange theory and social dominance theory in analyzing data from 357 pairs of employee–supervisor questionnaires. The analysis confirmed the importance of employee ethical behavior (versus work performance) in predicting empowering leadership, and the crucial role of leader trust in connecting employee ethical behavior and work performance with empowering leadership. Leader-perceived power threats negatively influence empowering leadership and mitigate the positive impact of leader trust on empowering leadership. Thus, this study extends the literature’s perspective about empowering leadership to include ethical concerns and leader–member interaction.

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Notes

  1. In this paper, the term leader–member relationship refers to an informal, specific personal connection between leaders and subordinates based on implicit shared commitments, loyalty, and obligation (Miao et al., 2020). The leader–member relationship and LMX are related, but distinct, constructs. Both refer to leader–subordinate relationships and are theoretically grounded in the social exchange theory (Miao et al., 2020). However, LMX is primarily developed using work-related exchange, whereas the leader–member relationship emphasizes personal associations characterized by affective attachment and deference to leadership (Davidson et al., 2017). Considering our research focus and the potential multicollinearity problem (i.e., leader–member relationship is positively related to task performance; Miao et al., 2020), we did not include the leader–member relationship in our quantitative model.

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Funding

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No: 71972077, 71872156).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Tourism, Huaqiao University, Quanzhou, 362021, Fujian Province, China

    Meizhen Lin

  2. School of Management, Xiamen University, Xiamen, 361005, Fujian Province, China

    Xiaoyi Wu

  3. College of Tourism and Foreign Languages, Jiangxi Environmental Engineering Vocational College, Ganzhou, 341000, Jiangxi Province, China

    Xiaolu Li

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  1. Meizhen Lin
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Correspondence to Xiaoyi Wu.

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Appendices

Appendix 1

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Table 4 Study 1: descriptive statistics for interviewed leaders
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4.

Individual In-Depth Interview Protocols

  1. 1.

    In your company, do middle and first-line managers generally delegate work to their subordinates? Why is that the case?

  2. 2.

    Do you often delegate tasks to subordinates in the workplace? Under what circumstances do you let them make decisions and complete tasks independently? What factors do you mainly consider when making your empowerment decisions? Please give specific examples.

  3. 3.

    Please exemplify the types of employees to whom you prefer to delegate.

  4. 4.

    What risks do you face from empowering subordinates? Please exemplify how you control these risks.

  5. 5.

    Please exemplify how you empower your subordinates in the workplace. You may provide an example of successful or failed empowerment. Please detail when, where, and how such cases occurred.

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Lin, M., Wu, X. & Li, X. Who are the Empowered Employees: Those with High Work Performance or High Ethical Behavior?. J Bus Ethics 186, 615–631 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-022-05232-9

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