授權型領導行為對員工工作滿意度和組織公民行為的影響研究 - 基於三個中介機制的比較分析

Abstract

With the development of the big data era, many enterprises have grown more complex. As leaders have recognized that they can not solve so many problems by themselves in a short time, empowerment is imperative. How to delegate effectively and make employees highly motivated are the choices and challenges which most organizations are facing now. Against this backdrop, we focus on the psychological mechanism through which empowering leaders influence their subordinates. Empowerment leadership emphasizes sharing power with subordinates and caring about the psychological perceptions of subordinates through delegation. Hence, we propose that empowerment leadership is effective only when affecting the psychological perceptions of subordinates. In this research, we associate empowerment leadership with subordinates' psychological responses; those psychological responses mediate the relationships between empowerment leadership and subordinates' job satisfaction and organizational citizenship behavior.

At present, much research on leadership behavior is focused on transformational leadership and transactional leadership, and only a few studies investigate empowerment leadership. Of these few studies, the main focus is on the relationship between delegation and employees' performance or employees' innovative behavior. Few studies examined the relationship between empowerment leadership and employee job satisfaction or organizational citizenship behavior. We are interested in this main effect and would like to open the "black box" of the relationship, exploring the mediation influence mechanism. To analyze the mediation influence path at depth, we use three theoretical models to support three corresponding mediators. The motivational model argues that more empowerment will give the subordinates a chance to participate in decision making, motivating them more intrinsically and enhancing psychological empowerment, which in turn lead to increased job satisfaction and a higher level of organizational citizenship behavior. Secondly, while relational model points out that leaders prefer to empower to those "in-group member" rather than "out-group member", as this would ensure that the power to be exercised under control. With the delegated power, in-group member will have more satisfaction and would be more willing to do extra work to maintain the in-group relations with leaders. The exchange-based model indicates that empowering leaders would like to share the information and power with subordinates and offer effective guidance and help them. Such leader behaviors are likely to foster subordinates' trust in the leader, which in turn leads to increased job satisfaction and more organizational citizenship behavior.

Furthermore, we attempt to compare the effects of three mediators. We use empirical research methodology and collect 660 valid responses through survey. We conduct a confirmatory factor analysis and multiple regression analysis to test our data. The results indicate that empowerment leadership has the positive effect on employees' job satisfaction and organizational citizenship behavior. The mediation comparison results indicate that psychological empowerment (based on the motivational model) has the strongest impact on the outcome variables, followed by trust in supervisor (base don the trust model), and leader-member exchange (based on the personal relation model) has the minimal, though significant, impact on job satisfaction and OCB. With hindsight, it is not surprising that intrinsic motivation is the most influential of individual behaviors when compared to other extrinsic related motivators. Psychological empowerment and intrinsic motivation are the most important mechanism for effective empowerment leadership. On the other hand, since leaders have limited time and energy, they can build up high levels of LMX with just a few subordinates. Due to the small number of in-group subordinates, only limited subordinates are motivated. Furthermore, the exchange relationship probably on account of relatives, similar region, background and so on, once they form the relationship, it would have good stability. Unless they have significant differences, generally the exchange relationship has the path dependence. So over time, the incentive function of LMX to the minority "in-group member" is not as strong as the other two mediators.

Theoretically, this research enriches empowerment theory and the research on leadership by comparing and analyzing the three mediational paths through which empowerment leadership impacts job satisfaction and organizational citizenship behavior. Practically, this research advocates that leaders should pay attention to employees' psychological perceptions and inner drive when they delegate. Leaders should make efforts to foster employees' enthusiasm and belief that they are in charge, so that employees' own value can be realized through proactive and desirable behaviors, which further enhances employees' satisfaction as well as benefits organizations.

Date of Award	31 Aug 2017
Original language	Chinese (Traditional)
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Jane YANG (Supervisor) & Junchen Hu (External Supervisor)