Heyn, Dagmar; Pruschak, Gernot (1 May 2024). Creating Inclusive Organizations through Followers’ Empowerment – A Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Transactional and Transformational Leadership on Structural and Psychological Empowerment In: 7th Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Leadership Symposium. Thessaloniki, Greece. 01/05/2024-04/05/2024.
The inclusion of followers in organizational decision-making processes enhances agility, innovation and adaptability, characteristics frequently sought after in today’s dynamic economy (Wang et al., 2022). To enable followers to make their own independent decisions, organizations must first empower them (Huang et al., 2010). Many studies have already investigated the antecedents of followers’ empowerment, identifying especially leadership as an important contributing factor (Seibert et al., 2011). To summarize the effects of leadership on followers’ empowerment, Schermuly et al. (2022) conducted a meta-analysis analyzing the effects of empowering, transformational, servant and transactional leadership on psychological empowerment. However, this meta-analysis left out the second dimension of empowerment, structural empowerment, which constitutes an important pre-requisite to psychological empowerment (Monje-Amor et al., 2021). Therefore, we extend the meta-analysis of Schermuly et al. (2022) by explicitly including structural empowerment and comparing the effects of leadership on the two empowerment dimensions. Hereby, we specifically focus on transactional and transformational leadership, because transformational leaders tend to change organizations’ structural frameworks while transactional leaders simply accept them as a given fact and operate within the boundaries (Bass, 1997), thus providing us with a different set of expectations about their effects on especially structural empowerment. The goal is to generate a holistic roadmap of how leadership can leverage inclusivity and participation through empowering followers to enhance self-directed working and streamline day-to-day operations. We followed the meta-analysis methodology outlined in Hunter and Schmidt (1990). First, we searched the Web of Science and Scopus for publications including combinations of leadership and empowerment in titles, abstracts and keywords. Given the large number of 3,075 initial results, we filtered our results to include only papers published in journals with a rank of at minimum two in the Academic Journal Guide 2021 (Walker & Wood, 2021) and only articles written in English. This left us with 455 papers which we evaluated manually. We dropped non-empirical papers (34), papers not including leadership and/or employee empowerment (221), papers that did not employ a standardized measure of transactional and transformational leadership as well as psychological and structural empowerment (120), papers running their analysis on the organizational instead of the follower level (4) and papers not providing information on the zero-order correlations (3). This cleaning procedure left us with 42 papers including 45 studies, all of which draw their data from surveying individuals working in organizations. We manually coded the information employed in the methods and analysis sections of those 45 studies. Following Hunter & Schmidt (1990), we referred to the zero-order correlation matrices and ran confirmatory factor analyses to determine the effects between the leadership and empowerment constructs. Before performing the meta-analysis, we conducted the following correction steps: We deleted the top and bottom 2% of the correlation coefficients to avoid problems arising from outliers and corrected for sampling error and error of measurement based on the number of observations and the distributions of the error values in the studies (Hunter & Schmidt 1990). The following table presents the results from the meta-analysis. It does not include the correlation between transactional leadership and structural empowerment because we only identified a single study (Si & Wei, 2012) including a correlation coefficient (0.31) for transactional leadership and structural empowerment. Nevertheless, we show that transactional and transformational leadership positively relate to both, structural and psychological empowerment. We furthermore demonstrate that the effects of transactional and transformational leadership on psychological empowerment do not differ significantly. Still, we find that the effect of transformational leadership on structural empowerment is significantly stronger than its effect on psychological empowerment. Table 1: Meta-Analysis Results Note: TAL+PE and TFL+SE data derived from six studies each. TFL+PE data derived from 40 studies. We also run sub-group analyses differentiating the studies based on two geographic regions: Western Europe & Northern America vs. Asia (all studies included in the meta-analysis were conducted in one of those two regions). Hereby, we find that the association between transformational leadership and structural empowerment is significantly stronger in Western Europe and Northern America than in Asia. The results of this meta-analysis emphasize that transformational leadership is crucial in generating inclusive organizations not only through psychological but even more through structural empowerment. Therefore, leaders should move beyond enhancing employees’ soft skills when aiming at ensuring inclusivity and empowerment of their employees by revising the formal organizational structure to enable employees to empower themselves. However, existing research on this important avenue, the interplay between leadership styles and structural empowerment, is scarce. We therefore point to this as a promising avenue for future research to enhance the inclusivity of organizations.
Item Type: |
Conference or Workshop Item (Abstract) |
|---|---|
Division/Institute: |
Business School > Institute for Applied Data Science & Finance Business School > Institute for Applied Data Science & Finance > Applied Data Science Business School |
Name: |
Heyn, Dagmar and Pruschak, Gernot |
Subjects: |
H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor > HD28 Management. Industrial Management |
Language: |
English |
Submitter: |
Gernot Pruschak |
Date Deposited: |
06 Aug 2024 15:02 |
Last Modified: |
06 Aug 2024 15:02 |
URI: |
https://arbor.bfh.ch/id/eprint/22025 |
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