A motivated information processing perspective on the antecedents of empowering leadership

Abstract

Empowering leadership is an important influence on team effectiveness. This makes the question of what the antecedents of team empowering leadership are an important issue to consider. To address this question, we propose a motivated information processing perspective that holds that engaging in empowering leadership is based on social information processing, and that there are individual differences in how elaborate that information processing is. We argue that a key consideration in shifting control from the leader to the team is the extent to which empowering leadership is driven by leaders’ consideration of their trust in the team (i.e., an instance of social information processing), and that leader need for closure (a trait capturing the disposition to carefully consider decisions and actions) moderates the relationship between leader trust in team and empowering leadership. A survey of N = 156 work teams supported these hypotheses.

The reciprocity of shared and empowering leadership

“…Empowering leadership is defined as a "process of sharing power, and allocating autonomy and responsibilities to followers, teams, or collectives through a specific set of leader behaviors for employees to enhance internal motivation and achieve work success" (Cheong et al, 2019, p. 34). In line with extant research, we assume that leader trust in the team will facilitate leaders taking such risks and empowering their team (Hakimi et al, 2010;Sharma & Kirkman, 2015;van Knippenberg et al, 2020). In sum, we expect leaders reporting higher trust levels towards their team to engage in more empowering leadership.…”

“…Sharma & Kirkman, 2015). When leaders trust their team, we assume they will more willingly show higher levels of empowering leadership, as their perceived risk for sharing influence and control will be lower (van Knippenberg et al, 2020;Tang et al, 2020). In addition we consider potential boundary conditions of this link, as we assume that leaders' perceived risk of shared leadership will be impacted by their managerial self-efficacy.…”

“…An important consideration for the leader-before potentially engaging in empowering leadership-is their prediction of the team's behavior in case they decide to share their power, control, and autonomy with them (van Knippenberg et al, 2020). As outlined above, we assume that a leader's prior experience with their team will impact their considerations.…”

The motivation and teaching strategies in pre-service physical education teachers

“…In terms of teaching, teachers' motivation is very important to effective teaching [1]. According to van Knippenberg et al [2], motivation can usually influence how the information is processed. Furthermore, as stated by Menges et al [3], motivation will enhance energy and the effort to do things.…”

The influence of empowering team leadership on employees' innovation passion in high-tech enterprises

“…On the one hand, empowering team leadership to express trust and respect for employees and confidence and good expectations in their ability to innovate (Cheong et al, 2019 ; Gao and Jiang, 2019 ), increases the motivation of innovation from the perspective of individual psychology. On the other hand, empowering team leadership will send a signal to employees to encourage independent exploration and encourage the development of personality traits (Smallfield et al, 2020 ; van Knippenberg et al, 2021 ), which in turn allows employees to perceive a climate of innovation that encourages everyone to take advantage (Yang et al, 2021 ). As social information processing theory can explain the influence of empowering team leadership on employees' individual psychology and organizational context, it is the theoretical basis of this study.…”