Empowering leadership: A meta‐analytic examination of incremental contribution, mediation, and moderation
verifiedrich profile · Journal of Organizational Behavior · 2017
Lee, Allan; Willis, Sara; Tian, Amy Wei
How this was studied
A meta-analytic synthesis — it pools many primary studies rather than running a single design, so there is no single-study diagram.
What this article reports
The findings we extracted from this work, normalized into Principia’s relationship form (X → Y). Each feeds the synthesized models below.
empowering leadership → task performance
Models this article informs
The meta-analytic priors this article contributes evidence to — its place in the broader synthesis.
empowering leadership predicts organizational citizenship behavior ocb
empowering leadership predicts task performance
In the authors’ words
The article’s own abstract.
Summary The concept of empowering leadership (EL) has seen increasing scholarly interest in recent years. This study reports a meta‐analysis investigating the effects of EL on employee work behavior. On the basis of data from 105 samples, we found evidence for the positive effects of EL on performance, organizational citizenship behavior, and creativity at both the individual and team levels. We further examined these relationships by exploring potential boundary conditions and the incremental contribution of EL over transformational leadership and leader–member exchange. Furthermore, at the individual level, both trust in leader and psychological empowerment mediated the relationships of EL with task performance, organizational citizenship behavior, and creativity. We also found evidence that leader–member exchange was a significant mediator between EL and task performance. At the team level, empowerment mediated the effects of EL on team performance, whereas knowledge sharing showed no significant indirect effect. Our results have important theoretical and practical implications and suggest some areas that require further research.
What the literature says about it
Attributed, open-access quotes from other works that cite this article, plus the citation-graph verdict tally. Corroborations and disputes, in one place — the honest-broker view.
supports “A recent meta-analytic study showed that empowering leadership has a variety of positive outcomes for followers, such as psychological empowerment, task performance, organizational citizenship behavior, and creativity (Lee et al., 2018).”
disputes “…impact on the behavior of individuals and teams in an organization, but, based on the results of the meta-analysis, several research results contradict this result (Lee et al., 2018; Li et al., 2017): empowering leadership does not always result in good team performance (Cheong et al., 2019).”
supports “Meta-analytic findings at both individual and team levels reveal that empowering leadership positively influences employees’ performance, organisational citizenship behaviours, and creativity (Lee et al., 2018).”
supports “A meta-analysis by Lee et al. indicated that the main e ff ects of empowering leadership on work outcomes (e.g., task performance, organizational citizenship behavior, and creativity) are predominantly positive [78].”
supports “A meta-analysis by Lee et al. indicated that the main e ff ects of empowering leadership on work outcomes (e.g., task performance, organizational citizenship behavior, and creativity) are predominantly positive [78].”
supports “In Lee et al.’s (2018) meta-analysis of 105 samples, empowering leadership was more predictive of outcomes relevant to diversity (such as enhanced creativity, team empowerment, knowledge sharing, organizational citizen-ship behavior, and trust in leaders), when compared to trans-formational…”
Ancillary research
Neighbouring works in the citation graph around this article.
- 10.1007/s10490-024-09947-3
- 10.20473/jmtt.v18i1.63886
- 10.1177/00812463251365493
- 10.3390/bs14080633
- 10.1002/1873-3468.70214
- 10.1007/s10551-025-05973-3
Assembled from Principia’s registry — bibliographic record, extracted effect sizes, the models they inform, and open-access citing literature.