Empowerment Leadership as a Predictor of the Organizational Innovation in Higher Education

Abstract

Purpose: This study aims to examine the relationship between empowerment leadership and organizational innovation. This analyzes the influence of empowerment leadership on organizational innovation, whether knowledge sharing mediates the effect of empowerment leadership on individual creativity, if individual creativity moderates the influence of empowerment leadership on organizational innovation, and how psychological empowerment mediates the effect of leadership on individual creativity.
 
 Theoretical framework: Empowerment leadership includes delegation of authority, participating in decision-making, informing employees about regulations, becoming a role model, showing concern, and interacting with the team members. Organizational innovation is the ability to generate and adopt new ideas or behaviors because it increases productivity and business performance. Knowledge sharing is a mechanism that fosters individual creative thinking and increases employees' creativity. Therefore, leaders tend to promote the practice of knowledge sharing by generating useful new ideas and thoughts.
 
 Design/methodology/approach: Respondents are lecturers at the Faculty of Economics and Business of Islamic Higher Education (IHE) in Java, Indonesia, who have been selected as participants. Data were analyzed using the PLS-SEM to test the modified results of several models.
 
 Findings: The results showed that empowerment leadership directly affects organizational innovation, knowledge sharing mediates the influence of empowerment leadership on Individual creativity howevet, it failed to mediate the effect of empowerment leadership on organizational innovation, while psychological empowerment failed to moderate the relationship between variables.
 
 Research, Practical & Social implications: This study added distinctive supports to the leadership literature by identifying key leadership behaviors that foster or impair individual creativity, knowledge sharing and organizational innovation through investigating their relationships with leadership styles in the same research model.
 
 Originality/value: This study indicates that empowerment leadership majorly affects organizational innovation. Furthermore, knowledge sharing plays an important role by mediating between variables for the development of organizational innovation.

Empowering leadership and organizational exploration: the role of preoccupation with failure and leader gender

“…In particular, by demonstrating that empowering leadership is related positively to preoccupation with failure and, in turn, organizational exploration, we extend current research that showed that empowering leadership can affect vital components of organizational exploration, such as creativity (Han, 2022;Liu et al, 2020), experimentation, risk-taking, intelligence, and innovation (Kim et al, 2018;Kjellstr€ om et al, 2022;Naqshbandi et al, 2019;Rohlfer et al, 2022;Supriyanto et al, 2023;Tariq et al, 2022;Zhang et al, 2022a, b). In parallel, we add to current research regarding how managers can empower exploratory activities to achieve more valuable outputs, like increased employee inventive performance (Jiang et al, 2023) and enhanced sustainable economic performance (Faulks et al, 2021).…”

“…As per Schinazi et al (2022), empowerment can lead an individual to gain the confidence and strength to act upon one's life. Furthermore, recent research highlights the association of empowering leadership with both organizational innovation (Kim and Beehr, 2022;Naqshbandi et al, 2019;Supriyanto et al, 2023) and management innovation (Rohlfer et al, 2022).…”

“…Past empirical research has shown that empowering leadership can promote various elements of organizational exploration, such as experimentation and innovation (Dahleez et al, 2022;Kim and Beehr, 2022;Kim et al, 2018;Kjellstr€ om et al, 2022;Lin et al, 2022;Naqshbandi et al, 2019;Rohlfer et al, 2022;Supriyanto et al, 2023;Zhang et al, 2022a, b). Aiming to advance theoretical and empirical research on the relationship between empowering leadership and organizational exploration per se (and not only several of its components), we tested the indirect relationship between empowering leadership and organizational exploration through preoccupation with failure.…”

“…Given that empowering leadership fosters core elements of organizational exploration, such as experimentation and innovation (Kim and Beehr, 2022;Kim et al, 2018;Kjellstr€ om et al, 2022;Naqshbandi et al, 2019;Supriyanto et al, 2023), we examine the role of empowering leadership in determining the specific outcome. In doing so, we highlight the underlying mechanism of preoccupation with failure, one of the five main principles of highreliability organizations.…”

“…, 2022; Naqshbandi et al. , 2019; Supriyanto et al. , 2023), we examine the role of empowering leadership in determining the specific outcome.…”