Abstract: Most of previous research on empowering leader behavior has adopted a leader-centric approach to examine its effectiveness. With the arising of followership theory, more research has emphasized the importance of examining leadership effectiveness from the follower-centric approach. Expectation plays an import role in management. Employee empowerment expectation refers to a set of norms that employees perceived about the responsibilities and obligations the leader should shoulder in terms of empowering. Based on reviewing the concept and measurement of employee empowerment expectation, the main findings from several theories such as role set theory, leadership categorization theory and met expectation theory are summarized. Finally, the future directions are discussed from several aspects: the validation of measurement based on implicit leadership theory, the logical framework from followership theory, the mechanism through integrating related theories, and the antecedents of subordinate empowerment expectation from the perspective of expectation management.

Key words: leader empowering behavior, empowering expectation, role expectation, followership theory, met expectation theory