Empowering Leadership Behavior and Work Engagement: The Mediating Role of Psychological Empowerment

Aim: Is to discuss and test the direct and indirect relationships between the empowering leadership
behaviors and work engagement, and the mediating role of psychological empowerment in this
relationship.
Design: Descriptive study has been conducted through the theoretical discussion to build the study
model, and empirical study to provide an empirical evidence of the relationships between variables of
study.
Methodology: The prior literature has been reviewed to learn about the theoretical background and
to formulate the hypotheses. The study applied on a sample of 360 employees at the Egyptian
cement industry in Upper Egypt. Data was collected using work engagement questionnaire based on
the Schaufeli, Salanova, González-Romá, and Bakker (2002) scale. The current study used the scale
of the Zhang & Bartol study (2010), prepared by Ahearne et al., (2005) to measure the empowering
leadership behaviors. Psychological empowerment has been measured using Spreitzer (1995) and
Zhung and Bartol (2010). The study was conducted using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences
(SPSS) program in data processing for AMOS to test the quality of compatibility between the collected
data and the theoretical data, and the structural model to test the study hypotheses.
Results: The empirical study results did not support the direct relationship between leadership
empowered behavior and work engagement. The empowering leadership behavior is positively
affecting the psychological empowerment. Psychological empowerment was found to be positively
affecting work engagement. However, the psychological empowerment was found to be mediating the
relationship between the two variables.
Conclusion: The study proved that the psychological empowerment is fully mediating the relationship
between the empowered leader’s behavior and work engagement. This may draw the attention of the
management at the cement factories to increase the area of empowering both leaders and
employees. Leaders in turn should work more with enhancing the leader-member relations. This may
lead to enhancing the effect of empowering leadership behaviors on work engagement in the future.
At the end of this chapter, we reached some concluding remarks related to the variables studied.