Many cross‐sectional studies have suggested that psychological empowerment (PE) – a higher‐order motivational construct – is related to employees' in‐role and extra‐role behavioural involvement (BI). The objective of this study was to assess the directionality of the longitudinal relationships between PE and employees' BI. Based on theories, three alternative causal directions are examined: two unidirectional models (PE → BI, BI → PE) and one reciprocal model including effects in both directions. A total of 818 health care workers completed self‐report questionnaires at three time points, equally spaced by a 1‐year lag. The results from autoregressive cross‐lagged fully latent structural equation models showed that on the construct level, PE significantly predicts subsequent BI, while the reverse causality was not supported. However, the exploration of relationships at the dimension level of PE suggests the existence of reverse and reciprocal relationship between some PE and BI dimensions. Consistent with previous longitudinal studies, levels of PE especially, but also BI, appeared to be very stable over time. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
Practitioner points
Psychological empowerment – as a global motivational state where all dimensions are present (meaning, competence, self‐determination, and impact) – appears to be a useful lever for lasting and pervasive effects on behavioural involvement. Organizational interventions could therefore prioritize the development of these critical cognitions to empower employees to subsequently perform in‐role and extra‐role behaviours.
Encouraging behavioural involvement at the organizational level (e.g., asking an individual to participate and voice on organization issues) could alternatively be the best strategy to increase subsequent level of three PE cognitions (e.g., competence, self‐determination, and impact).
The stability of the psychological empowerment and behavioural involvement constructs could indicate the importance of appropriate selection and work environment sustaining employees' empowerment.
Purpose
Using the substitute for leadership framework, the purpose of this paper is to verify whether employees’ perceived value congruence with their organization can act as a moderator of the relationship between transformational leadership and empowered behaviors. A triple moderation hypothesis, wherein value congruence could both enhance or substitute leadership practices depending on employee tenure, is tested.
Design/methodology/approach
Self-reported data were collected from 1,934 employees of a large public organization.
Findings
Hierarchical regressions show that value congruence enhances transformational leadership’s effectiveness in new employees, but plays either a substitute role or no role at all in more tenured employees.
Research limitations/implications
Findings suggest that the substitutes for leadership framework are useful in understanding both the enhancing and substitute role of value congruence with regards to transformational leadership. This study also underlines this framework’s complexity and the need for additional research that goes beyond bivariate models to further our understanding of transformational leadership moderators.
Practical implications
The knowledge of when leadership practices are enhanced or substituted could help leaders focus their efforts to maximize empowered behaviors.
Originality/value
This study verifies the theorized moderating role of value congruence in transformational leadership, which has been largely ignored in research. Additionally this study shows that this role can fluctuate according to tenure.
We examine the relationship between transformational leadership and job improvement behaviors by considering the moderating effect of leader extraversion and the mediating role of employee vitality. Multi-level path analysis on data from 101 leaders and 619 subordinates provided support to the moderating effect of leader extraversion, such that the relationship between transformational leadership and employee vitality is stronger when the level of leader extraversion is high. Moreover, a moderated mediation procedure showed that the indirect effect of transformational leadership on job improvement via employee vitality was conditional to the level of leader extraversion. We highlight the original contributions of these findings by discussing the moderating role of leader extraversion as an understudied theoretical alternative to its already well-explored role as an antecedent to leadership behaviors. On a practical level, our results indicate that organizations should consider not only what leaders do (transformational leadership behaviors) but also how these behaviors are contextualized by leaders’ typical approach (extraversion) to instill a maximum of positive emotion such as vitality in employees.
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