Leaders’ Pathways to Followers’ Empowerment: A Meta-Analysis

Empowering followers to take decisions on their own constitutes an important competitive advantage in todays dynamic organizational environments. Prior research has already demonstrated that leaders, especially those embracing transformational leadership, play a crucial role in eliciting the psychological empowerment of their followers. However, much less attention was given to structural empowerment despite its high relevance as a first enabler of empowerment. This is especially of high relevance when comparing the effects of transformational and transactional leadership as leaders embracing transformational leadership tend to change the organizational structure whereas transactional leaders simply accept it as a given fact and operate within its boundaries. We therefore conduct a meta-analysis exploring the relationships between transformational and transactional leadership and psychological and structural empowerment. Our findings comprising results from 45 studies indicate that transactional and transformational leadership moderately positively relate to psychological empowerment whereas there exists a strong positive association between transformational leadership and structural empowerment. Sub-group analyses highlight regional variations, with transformational leadership exhibiting a stronger association with structural empowerment in Western Europe and Northern America compared to Asia. Our findings underscore the role of transformational leadership in eliciting structural empowerment, urging leaders to consider organizational restructuring for fostering employee empowerment. We also highlight the need for future research to delve deeper into the interplay between leadership styles and structural empowerment, presenting an unexplored avenue for enhancing competitive advantage.