Empowering Leadership, Psychological Safety, and Task Performance: A Moderated Mediation Model

Abstract

This study examined the mediating effect of psychological safety on the relationship between empowering leadership and employee task performance based on psychological engagement theory. The results suggests that empowering leadership induces higher psychological safety, which in turn is associated with higher employee task performance. This study also examined the moderating effect of promotion focus motivation and prevention focus motivation. The empowering leadership had lesser positive effect on employee task performance via psychological safety when employees exhibited higher prevention focus. On the other hand, empowering leadership had stronger positive effect on employee task performance through psychological safety when employees were promotion focused. The conditional indirect effect of empowering leadership was strongest when employees displayed higher promotion focus and lower prevention focus. Implications, limitations, and future research area is presented.