Changes in the organizational structure of enterprises and the way they work are constantly accelerating due to the continuous innovation and development of science and technology leading to an increasingly competitive market. Many organizations have flattened their hierarchical structures while pursuing efficiency. In a flat organizational structure, organizational hierarchies are reduced and managers begin to share power with their subordinates in order to reduce their own work pressure, causing employees at lower levels to have expanded job responsibilities and complex job roles, while valuing support from their direct supervisors in the form of shared data, rewards, resources and authority. As a result, empowering leadership behaviors are receiving more and more attention from scholars and managers as a kind of leadership behavior that is of particular concern in modern companies. The relationship between the two has become a focal point of empirical research, but there is no clear conclusion on the relationship between empowering leadership behaviors and employee performance in existing studies. Using self-efficacy as a mediating variable and proactive personality as a moderating variable, this study attempts to investigate the effect of empowering leadership behaviors on employee performance and further explore the mechanisms and boundary conditions of this effect, which has not been agreed in the academic field.
Through questionnaires and empirical analysis, this study attempts to answer the interrelationship between empowering leadership behaviors and job performance and the role of self-efficacy and proactive personality in it. 227 sets of valid paired questionnaires were analyzed from employees and their supervisors, and the results showed that: (1) the direct effect of empowering leadership behaviors and employee performance was not verified. (2) There is a positive relationship between empowering leadership behavior and employee self-efficacy, and between employee self-efficacy and employee job performance; employee self-efficacy has a fully mediating role in the relationship between empowering leadership behavior and employee job performance, and empowering leadership behavior has a significant positive effect on job performance mediated by self-efficacy. (3) There is a moderating effect of proactive personality between empowering leadership behavior and self-efficacy, and this effect is more significant when the level of proactive personality is higher. The moderating effect of proactive personality in the influence of empowering leadership behaviors on job performance through self-efficacy was found to be significant for higher levels of proactive personality and to a lesser extent for lower levels of proactive personality. This finding expands the research on the relationship between empowering leadership behaviors and employee performance and clarifies the boundary conditions of the mechanism by which empowering leadership behaviors affect employee performance through self-efficacy. The results of the study are theoretical contributions to the study of empowering leadership behaviors, job performance, self-efficacy, and proactive personality, and are of practical value to companies in terms of management improvement.
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