The Double edges of empowerment: unravelling the motivations behind empowering leadership and its paradoxical effects on diverse groups

<p dir="ltr">In the context of global competition, empowering leadership has become crucial for enhancing organisational innovation and flexibility, yet its implementation faces challenges. Employees may feel uneasy with increased decision-making power, while managers may hesitate due to trust issues. Therefore, investigating the factors that drive leaders to implement empowering behaviours, as well as how to effectively harness empowering leadership, is essential for deeply understanding corporate management practices and advancing management innovation, both theoretically and practically.</p><p dir="ltr">Despite progress in empowering leadership research, limitations remain. First, existing studies focus on leader traits and organisational contexts, lacking exploration of deeper motivations driving empowerment behaviours. Second, there is insufficient analysis of the dual impacts of empowering leadership, especially across multiple levels. Finally, the lack of a unified theoretical framework limits the explanatory power of current findings. To address these gaps, this thesis explores key questions such as what are the motivations behind the emergence of empowering leadership? When does empowering leadership yield positive or unintended effects? What are the mechanisms behind these paradoxical effects? Using the dual evolutionary model of social hierarchy and the job demands-resources model, this research conducts multi-source, multi-wave studies on Chinese managers and employees, applying SPSS 29.0 and Mplus 8.3 for regression and structural equation modelling. The thesis consists of three studies to validate the proposed models and hypotheses.</p><p dir="ltr">Study 1 explores the antecedents of empowering leadership through the lens of the dual evolutionary model of social hierarchy, examining the differential impacts of dominance and prestige motivations on leaders’ implementation of empowering behaviours, as well as the moderating role of organisational interpersonal justice. It finds that managers with prestige motivation are more inclined to adopt empowering leadership styles, whereas those with dominance motivation are less so. Additionally, interpersonal justice enhances the positive link between prestige motivation and empowering leadership and diminishes the negative relationship between dominance motivation and empowering leadership.</p><p dir="ltr">Study 2, based on the job demands-resources model, explores the perceptual differences among teams regarding whether empowering leadership is viewed as a job demand or a job resource, and investigates how empowering leadership facilitates team innovative behaviour through mediating mechanisms and moderating factors. The results show that teams tend to view empowering leadership more as a job resource rather than a job demand. Empowering leadership promotes team innovative behaviour by enhancing team cohesion and collective work engagement. Moreover, team collectivist culture positively moderates the relationship between empowering leadership and team cohesion.</p><p dir="ltr">Study 3, drawing upon the job demands-resources model, explores the perceptual differences among employees regarding whether empowering leadership is viewed as a job demand or a job resource, and investigates how empowering leadership hinders employee innovative performance from a cross-level perspective. The results indicate that IV employees perceive empowering leadership more as a job demand rather than a job resource. Empowering leadership exacerbates role ambiguity and job burnout, thereby negatively impacting employees’ innovative performance. Additionally, employee power distance orientation positively moderates the relationship between empowering leadership and role ambiguity.</p><p dir="ltr">The thesis contributes to leadership research by integrating evolutionary and organisational behaviour theories to offer a nuanced understanding of how empowering leadership emerges and fosters or hinders innovation at different organisational levels. It also provides practical insights for improving leadership strategies in corporate management.</p>