Negative Influences of Differentiated Empowering Leadership on Team Members’ Helping Behaviors: The Mediating Effects of Envy and Contempt

Abstract

Purpose: Given the popularity of empowerment practices among scholars and practitioners, this research examines whether a manager's differentiated empowering leadership negatively affects team members' helping behaviors and, if so, how. Methods: The authors conducted one multi-source and time-lagged survey (with 44 managers and 212 team members) and two scenario-based experiments (with 120 participants in Study 2 and 121 participants in Study 3) to test the research model. Results: Team managers' differentiated empowering leadership decreases team members' helping behaviors. In particular, for team members who receive less empowerment, differentiated empowering leadership may decrease their helping behaviors by eliciting their envy. For team members who receive more empowerment, differentiated empowering leadership may decrease their helping behaviors by inducing their contempt. Conclusion:This research introduces the concept of differentiated empowering leadership in response to calls to investigate the dark side of empowering leadership. It reveals that unequal distribution of authority among team members by managers can undermine employee relations and elicit negative emotions of envy and contempt, thereby decreasing employees' helping behaviors.

The Curvilinear Relationship Between Empowering Leadership and Team Performance: A Self-Regulatory Perspective

“…While previous research has predominantly focused on the positive effects of empowering leadership on team outcomes (e.g., Amoroso et al, 2021; Hsu et al, 2023; Tang et al, 2020), there is a growing recognition of the need to include both the potential benefits and costs associated with this leadership approach into consideration (e.g., Cheong et al, 2019). As emerging research sheds light on the potential negative effects of empowering leadership on team-level helping behavior (Sun et al, 2022), scholars have gradually recognized that empowerment can be dysfunctional for optimal team functioning. Although prior studies have demonstrated inconsistent findings of empowering leadership at the team level (i.e., team performance), our understanding of how empowerment manifests these paradoxical effects was limited.…”

“…M. Lin et al, 2022; Tang et al, 2020). However, emerging research revealed the potential negative impact of empowering leadership on team consequences (e.g., team performance, Han et al, 2022; helping behavior, Sun et al, 2022), suggesting that empowerment may not always be beneficial in optimizing team functioning. Given this conflicting pattern of findings, scholars called for greater attention to the effectiveness of empowering leadership at the team level (e.g., Cheong et al, 2019) to consider how (via what mediators or intervening variables) and when (in the presence of what moderators) empowering leadership might lead to higher or lower team consequences, especially team performance.…”

“…For instance, while critiques of empowering leadership suggested that high levels of empowerment have the potential to generate negative team consequences from the perspective of team-differentiated empowerment (e.g., Han et al, 2022; Sun et al, 2022), these studies failed to sufficiently explain why empowering leadership tends to become dysfunctional at high levels of implementation. In addition, prior investigations construed empowering leadership as a contextual variable that interacts with various team factors to ascertain the conditions under which it correlates with enhanced or diminished team effectiveness (e.g., Magni & Maruping, 2013).…”

Family-Work Conflict and Successful Aging at Work of Employees in Manufacturing Enterprises in North China

“…In study 1, a situational experiment has been designed to examine the causal relationship between FWC and SAW, which is a method with high internal validity and can be used to test causal conclusions. 39 After that, in order to ensure the external validity of the research results, in study 2, a two-wave and time-lagged field study has been designed, this study examined the full conceptual model, 40 including the mediating role of OFTP and the mediating role of FWAP. The research results of different methods are combined to ensure the validity and generalization of the research results.…”

Exploring the Empowering Leadership under Different Organizational Contexts: Based on Multi-case Study of Chinese Hi-Tech Enterprises

“…The individual level focused on the employee behavior and found the personal characteristics as key factor to explain the effect of leadership empowerment. While some scholars argue that empowering leadership behaviors may have negative consequences, such as employee misconduct [4] , Sun suggests that disparities in empowering leadership can lead to an unequal distribution of power, damaging employee relationships, triggering negative emotions such as, jealousy and contempt, and reducing employees' inclination to assist others [5] . Chen et al contend that employee conflicts can diminish the positive effects of empowering leadership on innovative behavior and may even negatively impact empowering leadership when conflicts escalate to a certain degree [6] .…”