Causes And Outcomes Of Psychological Empowerment In Chinese Context

The construct "employee empowerment" has always been a hot topic in organizational behavior area since it was introduced by Kanter (1977). Scholars consider empowerment a pivotal role in cascading authority and responsibility, and remains considerable interest in this topic, especially after Conger (1988) proposed a psychological approach to study empowerment. In China, similarly, the construct of empowerment also generates substantial research interest. Since no studies conduct a systematic review about psychological empowerment in Chinese context, we write this paper to fill the blank.In attempt to synthesize accumulating research findings in psychological empowerment in Chinese context and to identify the nature of the relationships between psychological empowerment and its antecedent and consequences, the meta-analysis was employed.51studies and52independent samples were included in the meta-analysis. Results showed leadership and social support were positively related to psychological empowerment, and psychological empowerment was positively related to employees’organizational commitment, job satisfaction, task performance, organizational citizenship behavior and innovation. Furthermore, several potential moderators were captured in the subgroup analysis. Also, the study contained an ad hoc design to explore the validity of empowerment as a latent multidimensional construct. The results revealed that evidence failed to support the idea that regarded empowerment as a latent multidimensional construct in China.