Empowering Leadership and Employees’ Achievement Motivations: the Role of Self-Efficacy and Goal Orientations in the Empowering Leadership Process

Empowering leadership – behaviors, such as transferring authority to employees, promoting their self-direction and autonomous decision making, encouraging them to set their own goals, coaching, and expressing confidence in their ability to successfully complete tasks – is a promising tool for managers to bring out the best in their employees. Employees’ achievement motivations as important qualifiers of empowering leadership effects are a crucial component in this process. Hence, the objective of this dissertation was to investigate in more depth how differences across individuals in such achievement motivations (i.e., self-efficacy and goal orientations) play out to alter the effect of empowering leadership. In the three empirical studies reported in this dissertation we demonstrate that a) generalized work-role self-efficacy can substitute for the effect of empowering leadership thereby rendering it ineffective, b) learning oriented individuals experience higher levels of job meaningfulness which fuels their creative potential, c) performance avoid oriented individuals experience increased competence which triggers in-role performance, and d) empowering leaders spawn a team-directed coordination process of information exchange which in turn learning oriented team members’ creative performance benefits from most (as compared to team members holding performance orientations).