How do Empowering Leadership Relate to Task Adaptivity and Task Proactivity? Examining the Role of Change-Related Self-Efficacy, Felt Responsibility, Emotional Engagement, and Proactive Personality

Abstract

In this thesis, we intended to contribute to the literature by looking at the importance of leader behavior on performance variables. Particularly, the paper investigated how empowering leadership influences employees’ task adaptivity and task creativity through different change-oriented motivational states. We aimed to look at whether change-related self-efficacy, felt responsibility for change and emotional engagement would influence the relationship between the mentioned variables. Finally, we tried to understand how proactive personality moderated the relationship between empowering leadership and the mediating variables. Our study examined 307 participants in total. Their change-oriented motivational states towards changes, concerning the concept of empowering leadership and task adaptivity and task proactivity were looked into. “PROCESS” was used to review the data that we were able to gather from people within our network. Our findings suggest that empowering leadership is important for employees to feel a “reason to” be committed to conduct changes at work, and accordingly, be more task adaptive and task proactive. Further, empowering leadership was positively influencing employees’ change-related self-efficacy and their task adaptivity/proactivity. However, the findings need to be interpreted with caution, as the internal consistency in the mediating variable was somewhat below limits. We also found that employees who was emotionally engaged at work, was more task adaptive and task proactive. However, this is not a result of empowering leadership, due to a non-significant relationship in our results. Furthermore, our research indicates that employees who are high on proactive personality, demonstrates a higher sense of felt responsibility for change. However, empowering leadership was not the reason for the latter relationship. Finally, practical implications, limitations and directions for future research are discussed.