Abstract
Although previous research has found that authentic leadership has a negative effect on employee burnout through structural empowerment, lack of psychological empowerment in the research cannot present a complete picture on how authentic leadership influences burnout because employees must experience being psychologically empowered for empowerment to be effective. Drawing on empowerment-related theories, this study integrates the three different perspectives of empowerment (authentic leadership, structural empowerment, and psychological empowerment) to examine their effects on emotional exhaustion, the core component of burnout, at multiple levels of analysis. Using a sample of 378 teachers from 59 primary and secondary schools in China, multilevel structural equation modelling results revealed that: (1) authentic leadership had an indirect effect on psychological empowerment partially through structural empowerment, (2) psychological empowerment played a full mediating role in the relationship between structural empowerment and emotional exhaustion, and (3) structural empowerment and psychological empowerment sequentially mediated the effect of authentic leadership on emotional exhaustion. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
Highlights
Burnout is a syndrome characterised by the three components — emotional exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy — in response to chronic job stress (Leiter & Maslach, 2004)
We conducted confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) at the individual level to verify the discriminative validity of the four employee self-reported variables, including authentic leadership, structural empowerment, psychological empowerment, and emotional exhaustion
Model comparison indicated that this model fitted the data better than any of the alternative models: the two-factor model A, the two-factor model B, the two-factor model C, and one-factor model
Summary
Burnout is a syndrome characterised by the three components — emotional exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy — in response to chronic job stress (Leiter & Maslach, 2004). It is of great importance to ascertain the antecedents to burnout and the relevant mechanisms to reduce its deleterious effect Among these studies regarding the mechanisms whereby authentic leadership impacts burnout, it is worth noting that Laschinger et al (2013) first explored the mechanism from the perspective of empowerment and found that authentic leadership had an indirect effect on nurses’ emotional exhaustion and cynicism through structural empowerment. While admitting their contribution to the literature, we suggest that their model cannot comprehensively explain the psychological process of how JOURNAL OF PACIFIC RIM PSYCHOLOGY, Volume 12, e35, page 1 of 11. In view that current studies have primarily focused on the effect of authentic leadership on nurses’ burnout, this study uses a sample of primary and secondary school teachers to test the hypothesised model in Figure 1, contributing to the literature by showing a comprehensive process of how authentic leadership impacts teacher emotional exhaustion from the perspective of empowerment
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