You raise me up and I reciprocate: Linking empowering leadership to organizational citizenship behavior and unethical pro‐organizational behavior

Abstract

Although empowering leadership is generally thought to be beneficial to employees and organizations, an emerging stream of work shows its potential negative impact. Drawing upon social exchange theory, we propose an integrated model that simultaneously examines the benefits and costs of empowering leadership. Specifically, we propose that team‐level empowering leadership can relate to both organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and unethical pro‐organizational behavior (UPB). We also examine the mediating role of employee workplace status and the moderating role of felt obligation in these processes. Using data from 301 employees and 57 leaders across two time points, we found that team‐level empowering leadership linked to leader‐rated OCB and employee‐rated UPB through workplace status. However, the positive indirect effect of team‐level empowering leadership on OCB was significant only when employees' felt obligation was high, and the indirect effect of team‐level empowering leadership on UPB was positive and significant only when employees' felt obligation was low. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings, as well as future research directions.

Examining antecedents of organizational citizenship behavior: An empirical study in Indonesian police context

“…When subordinates are empowered by having great control at work, they can encourage them to feel a deeper meaning for what has been done in their work. Empowering leadership becomes an organizational stimulus to influence its members or team [ 24 ]. Thus, they can foster a high sense of self-confidence and competence to be loyal to the organization.…”

A Proposed Framework of Corporate Social Responsibility Dimensions and Employees' Unethical Pro-organizational Behaviour: Evidence from Chinese SMEs

“…The research on unethical pro-organization in the workplace focuses on its antecedents (Mo et al, 2023;Liu et al, 2022). Researchers hope to reduce UPB in enterprises and to reduce the potential long-term costs associated with UPB by studying the factors influencing or forming mechanisms of UPB (Griep et al, 2023;Liao et al, 2023;Wang et al, 2023).According to the literature review, the antecedents of UPB mainly focus on personal factors, leadership factors and organizational factors.…”

“…There is a growing body of research on leadership factors, the influence relationship between UPB and servant leadership, empowering leadership, transformational-transactional leadership, ethical leadership, charismatic leadership have all been studied. For example, Honglei Wang discussed team-level empowering leadership that produces organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB) when perceived obligation is high, while producing UPB when perceived obligation is low, which proves the existence of empowering leadership's dark side (Wang et al, 2023). A large number of studies on organizational factors emerged, such as Abusive supervision (Yan et al, 2023), high-performance work systems (Jabari et al, 2023), highcommitment human resource management (Song & Christian, 2023), power distance orientation (Li et al, 2023), performance-approach goal orientation (Mo et al, 2022) and so on.…”

How to Elicit Organizational Citizenship Behavior? The Role of Strengths-Based Leadership

“…To motivate employees to exhibit more OCBs, the relationship of leadership with follower OCB has received substantial attention from scholars because leadership plays a key role in affecting follower behaviors. Considerable research has demonstrated that employee OCB can be driven by various leadership behaviors such as humble leadership, transformational leadership, and empowering leadership (Cho et al, 2021; Wang et al, 2023).…”