Purpose: The aim of this study is to examine the mediating role of empowerment on the relationship between paternalistic leadership styles such as benevolent, moral, and authoritarian and employee innovative behavior. Design/methodology/approach: The data were collected from 390 employees of manufacturing companies in the Republic of Korea. To assess the validity of hypotheses we used a structural equation modeling procedure. Findings: The findings suggest that empowerment mediates the relationships among moral and authoritarian leadership styles and employee innovative behavior. However, results indicate that employee innovative behavior does not mediate the associations between benevolent leadership style and employee innovative behavior. Originality/value: Our work is the first to investigate the mediating role of empowerment on the link between paternalistic leadership styles such as benevolent, moral, and authoritarian and employee innovative behavior.
We examined the mediating role of empowerment in the associations among centralization, formalization, and employee innovative behavior in organizations. Respondents were 750 highly skilled full-time employees of manufacturing organizations in the Republic of Korea who completed a self-administered
survey. Structural equation modeling was used to evaluate the hypotheses of our study. The findings demonstrated that centralization and formalization were negatively related with empowerment. Empowerment was positively associated with employee innovative behavior, and played a mediating role
among centralization, formalization, and innovative behavior. We recommend that managers of organizations establish self-managed teams that are able to make decisions autonomously, and that managers use a less formalized organizational structure to enhance employee empowerment.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.