Linking Leadership Empowerment Behavior To Employee Attitudes And Behavioral Intentions: Testing The Mediating Role Of Psychological Empowerment

To improve their overall flexibility and efficiency, many organisations have replaced traditional hierarchical management structures with empowered (semi-autonomous or self-managing) work teams. Managers, once charged with directing and controlling work, are now asked to take on a new set of roles and responsibilities in order to lead these teams (Lawler, 1992). Arnold and colleagues (2000) identified five categories of empowering leadership behavior and constructed and validated a scale for measuring those behaviors. The authors build on their work by investigating how these behaviors relate to employee attitudes and behavioral intentions.