Empowering Leadership Behavior and Work Engagement: The Mediating Role of Psychological Empowerment | Chapter 03 | Current Perspective to Economics and Management Vol. 3

Aim: Is to discuss and test the direct and indirect relationships between the empowering leadership behaviors and work engagement, and the mediating role of psychological empowerment in this relationship.

Design: Descriptive study has been conducted through the theoretical discussion to build the study model, and empirical study to provide an empirical evidence of the relationships between variables of study.

Methodology: The prior literature has been reviewed to learn about the theoretical background and to formulate the hypotheses. The study applied on a sample of 360 employees at the Egyptian cement industry in Upper Egypt. Data was collected using work engagement questionnaire based on the Schaufeli, Salanova, González-Romá, and Bakker (2002) scale. The current study used the scale of the Zhang & Bartol study (2010), prepared by Ahearne et al., (2005) to measure the empowering leadership behaviors. Psychological empowerment has been measured using Spreitzer (1995) and Zhung and Bartol (2010). The study was conducted using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) program in data processing for AMOS to test the quality of compatibility between the collected data and the theoretical data, and the structural model to test the study hypotheses.

Results: The empirical study results did not support the direct relationship between leadership empowered behavior and work engagement. The empowering leadership behavior is positively affecting the psychological empowerment. Psychological empowerment was found to be positively affecting work engagement. However, the psychological empowerment was found to be mediating the relationship between the two variables.

Conclusion: The study proved that the psychological empowerment is fully mediating the relationship between the empowered leader’s behavior and work engagement. This may draw the attention of the management at the cement factories to increase the area of empowering both leaders and employees. Leaders in turn should work more with enhancing the leader-member relations. This may lead to enhancing the effect of empowering leadership behaviors on work engagement in the future. At the end of this chapter, we reached some concluding remarks related to the variables studied.

Author(s) Details

Prof. Adel R. M. Rayan
Egypt-Japan University of Science and Technology (E-JUST), Egypt.

Ahmed S. M. Sebaie Ph.D
Assiut University, Egypt.

Nagwa A. Ahmed
Higher Institute of Management and Computer Science, Minya, Egypt.

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