You Raise Me Up and I Reciprocate: Linking Empowering Leadership to OCB and UPB

Abstract

Although empowering leadership is generally thought to be beneficial to employees and organizations, an emerging stream of work shows its potential negative impact. Drawing upon social exchange theory, we propose an integrated model that simultaneously examines the benefits and costs of empowering leadership. Specifically, we propose that team-level empowering leadership can lead to both organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB). We also examine the mediating role of employee workplace status and the moderating role of felt obligation in these processes. In data obtained from 301 employees and 57 leaders across multiple time points, we found that team-level empowering leadership would lead to employee OCB and UPB through workplace status. However, the positive indirect impact of team-level empowering leadership on OCB was significant only when employees’ felt obligation was high, and the indirect effect of team-level empowering leadership on UPB was positive and significant only when employees’ felt obligation was low. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings, as well as future research directions.