Psychological empowerment has become a popular construct in organizational research and practice. Leadership ranks high among the best predictors of employees’ psychological empowerment, yet little is known about which leadership styles prove more effective than others. This meta-analysis investigates the effects of four leadership styles on psychological empowerment. More specifically, we test whether empowering leadership evokes more psychological empowerment than transformational leadership, servant leadership, or transactional leadership. We found that empowering, transformational and servant leadership contribute almost equally to psychological empowerment. No relationship was found with transactional leadership. In an explorative manner, we tested the effects on the different dimensions of psychological empowerment. We found that the leadership styles had a weaker influence on the competence dimension of psychological empowerment. We also investigated the effects of several moderators on the relationships with psychological empowerment: country culture (power balanced freedom (PBF)), study design (cross-sectional vs. multi-wave studies) and publication status (published vs. unpublished). We found no moderating effects of culture, which indicates the universally empowering effects of the leadership styles. The relationships between leadership and empowerment were somewhat weaker when data were collected at different measurement points, and publication bias does not seem to be an issue in this research field.

Effective training transfer continues to be a challenge in human resource development (HRD). In this study, we examined the diversity of the training group as a predictor for training transfer because it has been shown to predict team performance in the work context. We compared K E Y W O R D S diversity faultlines, human resource development, perceived subgroups, psychological safety, team learning behavior, training transfer

Successful training transfer is necessary for employees to adapt to this fast‐changing working world. In this study, we investigate whether transformational trainer behaviour can inspire training participants to change their self‐concept during training and whether this is related to increased training transfer. Following the self‐concept based theory, we examine the relationship between transformational trainer behaviour and training transfer, mediated by psychological empowerment. Moreover, we test a cross‐level interaction such that the indirect effect varies based on the number of participants per training group. We conducted a two‐wave study with 373 training participants in 58 training groups. Multilevel moderated mediation analysis showed that the training participants’ psychological empowerment mediated the positive relationship between transformational trainer behaviour and training transfer two months later. However, this indirect effect was not moderated by the number of participants per group. These results add to the discourse on the importance of trainers for training transfer and offer a new perspective on training as changing the participants’ self‐concept.

Abstract. Psychological empowerment – the experience of competence, meaning, self-determination and impact at work – has become very popular in organizational research. Meta-analytic results show many positive consequences of psychological empowerment and many different antecedents such as positive leadership, high performance practices, and work design characteristics. However, scarce research is available on how organizational culture influences psychological empowerment. We believe a missing instrument is one reason for the underdevelopment in this field. For this reason, we developed IMPEC (Instrument Measuring Psychological Empowerment Culture) for measuring specific cultural values for psychological empowerment. IMPEC was tested in four studies. In the first study ( n = 208 German employees), the reliability, factor structure, and its relationship with psychological empowerment and affective variables were analyzed. The second study had two waves ( n = 182 German employees) in which the predictive and incremental value of the IMPEC for performance-oriented variables were evaluated. In the third study, the instrument was translated into English and validated in a US sample ( n = 346). Finally, a multi-wave study was conducted in a German setting ( n = 210) to test if the IMPEC could predict critical constructs better than the empowerment climate questionnaire.

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