Over the past three decades, empowerment interventions and practices have emerged as important approaches to promoting constructive attitudes and behaviors among employees. Work designs that flow from such approaches are characterized by autonomy, self-leadership, and delegation of responsibility and decision-making authority. This movement represents a fundamental shift of power down the hierarchy to subordinates with high levels of appropriate knowledge and skills, and the terms knowledge work and knowledge workers are expressions that have emerged to characterize this change (e.g., Pyöriä, 2005). Despite attempts to dismiss empowerment as a passing fad (e.g., Abrahamson, 1996), research findings and experiences from practical implementation (e.g., Birdi et al., 2008) have demonstrated promising results that support the relevance of empowerment as it contributes to positive outcomes for both organizations and individuals (Seibert, Silver, & Randolph, 2004). This was recently underscored by Seibert, Wang, and Courtright (2011) in their review of psychological and team empowerment in organizations, in which they concluded that "empowerment is an effective approach for improving employee attitudes and work behaviors in a broad range of contexts (i.e., industries, occupations, and geographic regions)" (p. 995).In the academic management literature, there has gradually emerged two main approaches to empowerment at work (Spreitzer, 2008). The first of these is a sociostructural perspective that involves interventions and practices by the organization, leaders, and managers that aim to empower employees (e.g., Bennis & Nanus, 1985;Lawler, 1986). The second is a psychological perspective based on employees' perceptions of their work role, conceptualized as a motivational construct called psychological empowerment manifested in four cognitions: meaning, competence, selfdetermination, and impact (Spreitzer, 1995;Thomas & Velthouse, 1990). These two approaches are related, since psychological empowerment can be viewed as intrinsic task motivation shaped on an ongoing basis by, among other things, one's work environment (Thomas & Velthouse, 1990). This relationship was also underscored by Laschinger, Finegan, Shamian, and Wilk (2004), who stated that "psychological empowerment represents a reaction of employees to structural empowerment conditions" (p. 528).Leaders are proposed to have a central role in the empowerment process of employees (Druskat & Wheeler, 2003;Randolph & Kemery, 2011), but this role is somewhat 565819J LOXXX10.
