| dc.description.abstract | This dissertation contributes to the leadership and empowerment literature by exploration of
the empowering leadership construct, which emerged as a distinct leadership approach in the
late 1980s as a response to changes in work life and society in general. A review of relevant
literature indicates that two related main approaches to empowering leadership have laid the
foundation for what we today associate with the construct; that is, the concept of
superleadership and various approaches of leadership that emphasize different forms and
degrees of power sharing (here called the classical approach). A main characteristic that
describes empowering leadership is supporting employees’ autonomy, which represents the
most prominent characteristic that distinguishes it from other leadership theories and thus
makes it more in line with the basic idea of empowerment at work. This particular autonomy
attribute with respect to empowering leadership is especially important in contemporary work
settings characterized by, among other things, more flexible, flattened, and decentralized
organizational designs and delegation of responsibility and decision-making authority to selfleading
knowledge workers.
Despite its place as a contemporary leadership approach, it is only in the last decade that
empowering leadership has received earnest attention in the academic management literature.
In fact, two-thirds of identified academic articles including the keywords empowering
leadership and/or superleadership were published in the period 2006 to January 2014. Still,
there are shortcomings in the literature with respect to various aspects of empowering
leadership that need to be investigated. Accordingly, this dissertation aimed to (a) theoretically
underpin and define empowering leadership as guideline for conceptualization and
operationalization of the construct, (b) to build, refine, and validate a new instrument for
measuring the construct, (c) to identify and test central mediators of empowering leadership,
and (d) to explore how self–other agreement of empowering leadership affects important
outcome variables. To examine these issues, six studies included in three papers were
conducted.
With promotion and development of employee autonomy as foundation, theoretical and
conceptual discussions in the first paper suggested that empowering leadership consists of eight
behavioral manifestations arranged within three influence processes. The first process was
labeled “power sharing” and includes the behaviors “delegating” and “coordinating and
information sharing.” The second process was labeled “motivational support” and includes the behaviors “encourage initiative,” “encourage goal focus,” “efficacy support,” and “inspiring,”
whereas the third process was labeled “development support” and includes the behaviors
“modeling” and “guidance.” Based on this conceptual model, a theoretically meaningful 18-
item, two-dimensional scale (i.e., the Empowering Leadership Scale; ELS) was developed and
validated for measuring the construct. The ELS showed distinctiveness in relation to scales
measuring leader – member exchange (LMX) and transformational leadership as well as ability
to predict incremental variance in psychological empowerment beyond these two scales.
Furthermore, in the first paper self-leadership and psychological empowerment were identified
and initially tested as essential mediators of empowering leadership.
Based on insights from the first paper, findings in the second paper further supported
the idea of self-leadership and psychological empowerment as mediating mechanisms in linking
empowering leadership to subordinate outcomes. The findings also suggested that selfleadership
mediates the relationship between empowering leadership and psychological
empowerment. Findings from the third paper indicated that a simultaneous appraisal of self and
subordinate ratings of empowering leadership might be useful in the prediction of outcome
variables in a culture such as the Norwegian one. Especially, incongruence in empowering
leadership ratings provided by self (i.e., leaders) and subordinates was suggested to be of
particular importance; that is, leaders’ over-estimation and under-estimation relative to the
ratings of subordinates. Moreover, the applicability of the Empowering Leadership Scale as a
multisource instrument was supported in that the scale showed stable psychometric properties
across both self and subordinate ratings of empowering leadership.
Considered across all three papers, empowering leadership (i.e., the ELS) demonstrated
positive associations with leader effectiveness/job performance and subordinates’ selfleadership,
psychological empowerment, job satisfaction, work effort, and creativity, as well as
negative association with subordinates’ turnover intention. | nb_NO |
