Empowering Leadership and Work Engagement: The Role of Psychological Empowerment as a Mediation

Rizqi Zulfa Qatrunnada^1* and Endang Parahyanti²

^aFaculty of Psychology, Universitas Indonesia, Depok, Indonesia; ^bFaculty of Psychology, Universitas Indonesia, Depok, Indonesia

¹e-mail : r.zulfa.q@gmail.ui.ac.id

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Empowering Leadership and Work Engagement: The Role of Psychological Empowerment as a Mediation

Background. Leadership is an important aspect for organization to manage their employees. Organization need to increase flexibility and effectiveness of the organization from hierarchy traditional leadership model to empowerment which concern with semi self-autonomy and self-leadership management.  Today, researchers and practitioners try to develop some initial empirical support in empowerment topics and its relationship to work-related outcomes. It is an important construct which potentially give positive influence outcomes that benefit both individual and organization. Previous study also indicates that empowering leadership lead to various outcomes, such as employee empowerment, job satisfaction, and work engagement. Engagement becomes more interesting issue because the majority of workplace nowadays dominated with Millennials. Millennials, or Gen Y, is a term to mention generation who are born between 1980 and 2000. In work-place, Millennials also known as a generation with low engagement to their job rather than other generations, such as Baby Boomers and Gen X. It should be a concern for many leaders because low engagement can be impact to the negative attitude of the employees towards their job performance. Leader need to enhance the understanding about leadership empowerment behavior to increase the employee engagement. In the current research, it mentions about the term of psychological empowerment, which consist of a set of conditions necessary for intrinsic motivation that mediating the relationship between empowerment leadership and work engagement. Therefore, this research aims to find out the mediating role of psychological empowerment in relations between empowering leadership and work engagement of Millennials employee in Indonesia.

Methods. A cross-sectional survey design was used to collect data at a time. The data collected based on online and offline survey. Online survey collected by sharing link to social media such as via E-mail, WhatsApp, and Line Messenger, and offline survey collected by spreading questionnaire directly to participant. Researcher assured respondents of the confidentiality of their respond. Sampling technique in this research applied with non-probability sampling with a convenience sample. This technique was chosen to ease researcher to find out the participants. Participant were 140 millennials employees aged 20-35 years with minimum education level of senior high school or equivalent, and have a working period of more than 1 year. The Empowering Leadership Questionnaire, Psychological Empowerment, and Work Engagement scales were administered. Mediation model 4 Hayes was used to investigate the hypothesis of the role mediation in relations between the variables. Data analysis using Hayes’s PROCESS Macro for SPSS v2.16.3, and 10.000 bootstrapped samples.

Results. Data indicated that empowering leadership was a significant predictor of psychological empowerment (β = .21, t(138) =  5.32, p = < .001), and that psychological empowerment positivity was a significant predictor of work engagement (β = .55, t(137) =  7.53, p = < .001). Resulted also indicated that empowering leadership was a significant predictor of work engagement (β = .25, t(138) = 6.32, p = <.001). Approximately 22% of the variance in work engagement was accounted for by the predictors (R²= .22). The indirect effect was tested using bootstrap estimation approach with 10.000 samples. These results indicated the indirect coefficient was significant (β = .116, SE = .0358, 95% CI = .0567, .1993). Empowering leader was associated with approximately .116 points higher work engagement scores as mediated by psychological empowerment. These result support the mediational hypothesis. In other words, when employees have an empowering leader they will feel more competent and in control. Psychologically, they will perceive themselves have empowerment towards their job and experience meaning in working. When the individual feels what they do is meaningful and give an impact for organization, they will be more loyal and engage to their job.

Conclusions. This research concludes that psychological empowerment mediated the relationship between empowering leadership and work engagement.

Added-Values. This research is conducted as development previous research that further explores the role of psychological empowerment as a mediation in relations between empowering leadership and work engagement in millennials employee, especially in Indonesia. It is also recommended for leadership style discussion, training program, and coaching about empowering leadership takes place.

Keywords: empowering leader; psychological empowerment; work engagement.

Word count: 691 words