PurposeThis study aims to explore mediational mechanisms and conditions by which empowering leadership leads to positive outcomes at the employee level. Using social identity theory (SIT) as a foundation, the authors present an integrated moderated mediation model to explain the interactive effects of empowering leadership and leaders' prototypicality on employees' work engagement through the mediation of organizational identification (OI).Design/methodology/approachThe research model was tested using multilevel nested data obtained from 634 employees working in 133 departments (teams) in the service sector of Pakistan.FindingsThe results reveal that empowering leadership influences work engagement through the mediation of OI. However, leader prototypicality has emerged as an important moderating condition for these relationships because, at a lower level of leader prototypicality, the positive effect of empowering leadership may diminish.Practical implicationsThe results of this study suggest that organizations should promote empowering leadership to increase their employees' OI and work engagement. Furthermore, it is suggested that leader prototypicality is important along with empowering leadership to inculcate positive behavior among employees.Originality/valueThis is the first study of its nature, which used SIT to explain the indirect effect of empowering leadership on employees' work engagement via OI. Furthermore, the bounding condition of leader prototypicality is also studied for the first time in the context of the indirect relationship between empowering leadership and employees' work engagement via OI. The authors note that the novel unique findings of this study have the potential to open additional further avenues of research in the field of empowering leadership.

Purpose The purpose of this study is to examine the influence of organizational identification on employee work engagement (EWE) and to what extent this relationship strengthens/weakens when moderated by gender and leader social dominance orientation (SDO). Design/methodology/approach To test the hypothesized relationships, the authors collected data from supervisors (n = 101) and their subordinates (n = 478) working in medium and large organizations in the service industry. To test the hypothesized model, the authors used structural equation modeling in MPlus. Findings The data revealed that organizational identification is positively associated with EWE. Interestingly, the effects were stronger on female EWE than male EWE. Furthermore, the findings of this study displayed that leader SDO negatively moderated the relationship between organizational identification and EWE. The results of this study were more potent when the leader SDO was low versus high. Originality/value The findings mainly contribute to the social identity theory by examining the moderating role of gender and leader SDO on the link between organizational identification and EWE. This study offers practitioners insights into the importance of gender in EWE and the type of leadership. Conducting this study in a developing economy provided a unique contextual finding, which will be helpful for the practitioners who want to improve the work engagement of female employees.

This research focuses on handling temporal constraints in interaction protocols for multi-agent systems. There is a dire need of standardized interaction protocols that can be used to handle timing aspects in real-time multi-agent system's negotiation. The most commonly used Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents Protocol lacks the appropriate specification in this regard. In real-time systems timing constraint is a major concern for all of its tasks and goals. Agents require real-time responses and must eliminate the possibility of massive communication between them. The timing specification of these real-time multi-agent systems in which agents communicate with each other to achieve their goals within deadline will be of great value for their correct functioning. A high degree of dependability and predictability is expected from real-time software agents. The basis of our work is the standardized interaction protocols to support the communication between agents in real-time environment and this is possible via message passing. By incorporation of welldefined timing parameters in Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents performatives, we have enabled them to be used in any realtime multi-agent's communication. We demonstrate the usage and effectiveness of our proposed real-time performatives using a case study of monitoring boats in marine reserves in which the agents interact with each other to accomplish their goals.

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Purpose This study aims to investigate the effect of differentiated empowering leadership on employees’ depression. Using the behavioral theory of depression, this study further explores the simultaneous moderation of gender and employees’ envy on the relationship between such leadership and employees’ depression. Design/methodology/approach Data were collected using two surveys conducted with a time lag of one week. In Time 1, data on differentiated empowering leadership and employees’ envy were collected. After a week, data on employees’ depression were collected. Model testing was conducted using data on a sample of 420 employees from 87 departments in 27 service sector organizations in Pakistan. Hypotheses were tested using the structural equation modeling technique in Mplus. Findings Results indicate that perceived differentiated empowering leadership positively affects employees’ depression. In addition, this positive effect is further moderated by employees’ envy and gender simultaneously, such that this effect is weakest among the male individuals who feel low envy, whereas, for highly envious females, this effect is strongest. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to examine the effect of differentiated empowering leadership on employees’ depression along with the moderation of employees’ envy and gender. Furthermore, this study provides some policy implications based on its findings to decrease employees’ depression.