Abstract:

With the ever-changing organizational environment, more and more business managers choose to empower their subordinates in exchange for more responsibilities and better performance, in order to help companies gain sustainable competitive advantages. For this reason, empowering leadership has received extensive attention from management practitioners and academic researchers, and has achieved fruitful research results. However, there are still have some disagreements about the effectiveness of empowering leadership in Chinese and foreign studies. Although Kim et al. (2018) and Lee et al. (2018) took the lead in conducting meta-analysis research on the impact of empowering leadership, their research objects were limited to English literature before 2016, and the samples based on the Chinese context were seriously small. As the second largest economy in the world and the “Cultural suzerain” of the Confucian Culture Cluster, China has a huge number of enterprises and labor force. Therefore, the meta-analysis should fully absorb research samples based on the Chinese context to more truly reflect the effectiveness of empowering leadership.

Based on 183 empirical studies (120 in English and 63 in Chinese), the authors use meta-analysis method to comprehensively examine the relationship between empowering leadership and leadership effectiveness, including individual work attitudes and individual performance (145 samples, 50509 employees), team performance (47 samples, 4856 teams) and organizational performance (9 samples, 1090 companies). The research results show that empowering leadership is significantly positively correlated with individual positive work attitudes (job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and subjective well-being), and significantly negatively correlated with individual negative work attitudes (turnover tendency, burnout & stress), and significantly positively correlated with individual (team) performance and its various dimensions, and is significantly negatively correlated with individual counterproductive behavior, but the positive correlation with organizational performance is not significant. Among them, the sample literatures of subjective well-being, team performance and team task performance may have publication bias, so that the meta-analysis results of empowering leadership with these variables are likely to be overestimated. In addition, the authors also examine the boundary effects of sample differences between East and West, measurement scales of empowering leadership, types of research data, and industry types of research sample on the relationship between empowering leadership and some performance indicators.

In terms of the differences between the Eastern and Western samples, the correlation between empowering leadership and individual (team) performance and individual (team) task performance are stronger in the East Asian samples and weaker in the European and American samples, but its relationship with individual (team) innovation performance and individual (team) contextual performance has no significant difference. However, the western sample of team innovation performance and the East Asian sample of team contextual performance are only one, so that the meta-analysis results of East-West comparison about team innovation performance and team contextual performance may be unstable and unreliable. In addition, the measurement scale of empowering leadership and types of research data are significantly moderated the relationship between empowering leadership and individual performance, but the industry types of research sample had no significant moderating effect on the relationship between empowering leadership and individual performance. The conclusion of this study provides a more comprehensive stage conclusion for the research on effectiveness of empowering leadership.

Key words: empowering leadership, leadership effectiveness, meta-analysis, moderating effect