Demystifying the nexus between empowering leadership and employee proactivity: a solicitation of person-environment theory

ABSTRACT

Employee proactivity has elicited great interest among academicians and practitioners alike. However, unfortunately, the underlying mechanisms and theoretical boundaries that amplify or dampen employee proactive behaviour at work remain under researched. Thus, to accelerate the discourse on employee proactive behaviour, this study explores the relationship between empowering leadership and employee proactivity through person-job fit and person-organization fit. Drawing insights from the person-environment theory, the study further examines the moderating role of role-based self-efficacy. Data were collected from 295 employees of Indian five-star hotels through a questionnaire survey and analysed through structural equation modelling. The results of this study confirm the significant direct impacts of empowering leadership, person-job fit organization-job fit on employee proactivity behaviour in a luxury context. Moreover, the study demonstrates the partial mediating role of person-job fit and person-organization fit while also confirming the moderating influence of role breadth self-efficacy; between the relationships of empowering leadership and employee proactivity. Given that the study uncovers the positive influence of leadership on employee proactive behaviour this study has important practical implication for managers working in luxury contexts, especially, hotels.

KEYWORDS:

• Empowering leadership
• employee proactivity
• person-job fit
• person-organization fit
• hotel employees

Acknowledgement

The third author would like to acknowledge Prince Sultan University, Saudi Arabia for its financial and academic support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).