Research On The Mechanisms Of The Paradoxical Effects Of Empowering Leadership On Employee Performance And Satisfaction

In recent years,with the gradual popularization of the flat organizational structure,empowering leadership has been highly valued in both research field and enterprise management practice.Empowering leadership,which gives employees additional power and responsibilities to encourage employees to lead themselves,has received close attention in the academic field.As research continues to deepen,researchers have come to realize that empowering leadership is a “double-edged sword” that brings positive effects to employees,teams and businesses,while also causing certain negative consequences.With the development of researches,several problem are yer to be answerd:What is the cause of the paradoxical effects? How does the employee’s need for empowerment influence the effect? Moreover,how does the distribution of empowerment waves its influences? With such questions,this paper aims to explore the possible double-sided impact of empowering and the mediation mechanism of this process.This paper can be divided into three parts.The first part contains a literature review of related theories and variables,such as empowering leadership,psychological empowerment,self-determination theory and organizational justice.Through the review of the literature,the connotation of the variables was elaborated and analyzed in detail.Important former studies were summarized,as well as the origin,development,measurement,antecedents and outcomes of related concepts.This part lay a solid theoretical foundation for the two empirical studies in the following chapters.The second part is an empirical study on the impact of the matching relationship of“empowerment demand-empowerment acquisition” on individual performance and job satisfaction,as well as the mediation role of psychological empowerment.Based on the self-determination theory,this study conducted a response surface analysis of the data through questionnaire surveys.The study found that the matching degree of employee“empowerment demand-empowerment acquisition” had an inverted U-shape effect on employee job performance through the mediation of psychological empowerment.In both case of insufficient empowerment and over empowerment,individual performance were lower than case where empowerment demand-empowerment acquisition was matched.The third part of the study examined the impact of employee “empowerment demand-empowerment acquisition” from the perspective of organizational justice.The influence of the distribution of empowerment was also examined,which further extended the research to the team level.The results indicated that the degree of matching between“empowerment demand-empowerment acquisition” and the relative empowerment that employees receive in the team had a non-linear impact on the outcome variables through the mediation of organizational justice.The results of the three studies together reflect that the process of empowering leadership behavior waves its double-sided influence is very complicated.Leaders should fully consider the needs of the employees and the distribution of empowerment while conducting empowering behaviors,in order to maximize the positive effect of empowering leadership.Finally,this paper summarized the research findings,discussed the theoretical and practical significance of the research as well as the limitations,and prospected the future research directions.