Leaders’ competence matters in empowerment: implications on subordinates’ relational energy and task performance

ABSTRACT

The effectiveness of empowering leadership has been the subject of contrasting views. Numerous studies have adopted an interactive approach to reconciling these inconsistencies and emphasized the role of subordinates’ competence and capabilities. We join this stream of discussions by pointing out that leader competence also plays a pivotal role in empowering subordinates. We further postulate that subordinates’ relational energy can mediate the interactive effects of empowering leadership and perceived leader competence on task performance. In Study 1, data analyses based on a sample of 397 team members and 112 team leaders reveal that relational energy mediates the interaction effect of empowering leadership and perceived leader competence on subordinates’ task performance. In Study 2, data analyses based on 193 leader – follower dyads reveal that the indirect effect of relational energy is still significant after controlling for several alternative mediators commonly used in empowering leadership research (e.g., LMX, intrinsic motivation, and psychological empowerment).

KEYWORDS:

• Empowering leadership
• perceived leader competence
• relational energy
• task performance

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. Following Goodman and Blum (1996), we excluded the possibility that there are differences between those who dropped out and those who did not by using logistic regression, as follower age, gender, education, and leader – follower tenure did not significantly correlate with the dichotomous variable which is an indication of whether the participants had dropped out.

2. There are high intercorrelations between several of our predictors, so we checked for multicollinearity, and the variance inflation factors of all independent variables were less than 5.

3. As a supplementary check, we controlled several variables in Study 1. As Wang et al. (2018) found that humble leadership may also trigger relational energy, and stereotyped competence attributions may bias the assessment of relational energy, we controlled humble leadership, leader age, and leader gender. The results were robust after controlling these variables.

4. We checked for multicollinearity. The variance inflation factors of all independent variables were less than 5.

5. As a supplementary check, the results were robust after controlling for leaders’ age and gender.

6. Moreover, we also examined whether empowering leadership has predictive power for relational energy beyond the role of humble leadership and spiritual leadership. As shown in Models 1–3 of Table 6, each leadership behaviour can significantly predict relational energy when the regressions are conducted separately. However, as shown in Model 4 of Table 6, when they are conducted simultaneously, all significant relationships disappeared.

7. The difference between the indirect effect via relational energy and the that via intrinsic motivation was significant (Δγ = .11, 95% CI [.043, .255]), and the difference between the indirect effect via relational energy and that via psychological empowerment was also significant (Δγ = .12, 95% CI [.042, .304]). The difference between the indirect effect of relational energy and that of LMX was nonsignificant (Δγ = .07, 95% CI [−.030, .263]). However, the results showed that the indirect effect of relational energy was still significant even after controlling for LMX. By contrast, the indirect effect of LMX became nonsignificant at the same time.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [71872109, 72272094, 71702105, 72271550], Program for Innovative Research Team of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics (No. 2020110927), Program for Innovative Research Team of College of Business of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics.