Leadership Styles and Psychological Empowerment: A Meta-Analysis

What is Psychological Empowerment?

It is a topic of Organizational Research that gives advantages to companies when acquiring and sustaining competitive positions within markets, and also benefits employees: leads to a proactive and motivated orientation at work.

It comprehends 4 work- related conditions: 

• Competence: self-efficacy of an employee, convincing themselves of having positive skills for high performance.
• Meaning: employees identify with the company’s objectives and feel that they can execute the work.
• Self-determination: perception of freedom to decide when to start or finish a task.
• Impact: belief in having influence on goals at work.

Relationship between Leadership and Psychological Empowerment

The study analysed 4 styles and their impact, dividing them by high, medium and low matches:

• Empowering Leadership: idea of power sharing, delegation of authority and resources, encouraging freedom. It is “the process of leading others to lead themselves.” It has a positive empowering.
• Transformational Leadership: it has 4 dimensions (inspirational motivation, idealized influence, intellectual stimulation, and individualized consideration) These leaders express confidence to employees and motivate them towards common goals. It positively empowers.
• Servant Leadership: leaders focus on stakeholders and employees’ development, with a strong moral foundation. Employees’ needs are fundamental, and they tend to offer participation in decision-making processes and delegating authority to employees. It has a positive empowering.
• Transactional Leadership: it has 3 dimensions (active management of exception, passive management of exception, and contingent reward) It is a more ‘traditional’ leadership style that clarifies expectations and offers recognition when goals are achieved. It has a positive empowering.

Which leadership style is better for improving Psychological Empowerment?

Empowering leadership appears to have the strongest relationship with psychological empowerment, while transformational and servant style were positive as well, depending on the socio-cultural context. In contrast, transactional leadership showed the weakest relationship.

In conclusion, the results indicated that leadership style was the most important factor above all (other behavioural moderators had no effects on the psychological empowerment of employees) and the distribution of power and freedom within a society plays a key role in leadership processes. Finally, after analyzing different styles, the result was that the empowering leadership style was the most effective and positive of all, appearing high in cultures with an elevated distribution of power and freedom.

Once again, this study confirmed that there is no such thing as a perfect leadership style because it will depend on the natural differences between people and their interactions. Therefore, there are alternatives when a leader guides employees at work in which positive results can be obtained that increase psychological empowerment if implementing: empowering, transformational, or servant leadership styles.

Article:

Schermuly, C. C., Creon, L., Gerlach, P., Graßmann, C., & Koch, J. (2022). Leadership Styles and Psychological Empowerment. Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, 29(1), 73–95. https://doi.org/10.1177/15480518211067751