To Identify the Relationship between Empowering Leadership with Followers’ Work Performance with the Mediating Effect of Work Overload      

To Identify the Relationship between Empowering Leadership with Followers’ Work Performance with the Mediating Effect of Work Overload

Abstract

This paper tries to study the direct relationship between empowering leadership and employee performance with the mediating effects of followers’ challenge stress (i.e. the work overload, and the work complexity). It is expected to contribute to the literature that followers’ challenge stress can be one of the feasible mechanisms to examine the relationship between empowering leadership and employee performance. This paper will draw four hypothesizes to examine the relationship between empowering leadership and followers’ work performance.

Keywords: empowering leadership, employee performance, work overload, emotional exhausted and work stress

Leadership plays a very important role in the relation between organization and individual employee (Obiwuru, Okwu, Akpa, &Nwankwere, 2011). Different leadership may lead to different employee performance outcome. Cheok and Eleanor (2012) claimed that the most effective and efficient leadership style is known as transformational rather than transactional. Therefore, most leaders are using either transformational or transactional leadership style to lead their followers. However, with increasingly competitive demands for higher and better performance to employees, working environment changed a lot, and employees are required to be able to deal with constant changes in the external environment(Takeuchi, 2005 and Thomas, &Velthouse, 1990). Thus, employee empowerment has received high attention in organizational research and practice (Chen, Sharima, Edinger, Shapiro, &Farh, 2011; Lorinkova, Pearsall, & Sims, 2013; Martin, Liao, & Campbell, 2013; Maynard, Gilson, & Mathieu, 2012). Moreover, the concept of empowerment has become more important in organizational research as employees can increase the effectiveness in their formal daily work by encouraging autonomy and self-responsibilities (Kirkman& Rosen, 1999; Spreitzer, 1995).

Numerous of management and leadership literatures have consistently recognized the importance of leader in influencing employee empowerment(Ahearne, Mathieu, & Rapp, 2005; Lorinkova , 2013; Martin et al., 2013; Sims, Faraj, & Yun, 2009). Empowering leaders encourage followers to think outside the box, take risks and enhance their self-responsibilities, leading them to be responsible to their performance and outcomes(Yun, Cox, & Sims, 2006).

Precisely, empowering leadership refers to a set of behaviors of the leader who shares power or allocates more responsibilities and autonomy to his or her followers through enhancing the meaningfulness of work, expressing confidence in high performance, promoting participation in decision making, and providing autonomy from bureaucratic constraints(Ahearneet al., 2005; Chen et al., 2011; Kirkman& Rosen, 1999; Zhang &Bartol, 2010).

Relatedly, as leadership scholars note that the relationship between a set of leader behaviors and followers’ performance is more complicated than the simple enactment of behavior (Kark, Shamir, & Chen, 2003; Srivastava, Bartol, & Locke, 2006). Cheong, Spain, Yammarino, & Yun (2015) mentioned that there are still some other mechanisms that can explain the relationship between empowering leadership and followers’ work role performance. Cheong et al. (2016) also provided some examples: perceived followers’ challenge stress and hindrance stress in which both ideas are drawn from leader’s empowerment and can be addressed as one of the feasible mechanisms to examine (Podsakoff, LePine, &LePine, 2007).

In this paper, I offer one main contribution. I contribute to the empowering leadership literature by studying if empowering leadership would lead to a bad work performance for employees with mediating effect of followers’ challenge stress. I will first start with analyzing the relationship of empowering leadership and employee work performance. Then, I would like to investigate in the relationship between empowering leadership and followers’ challenge stress. After that, the relationship between the challenge stress and performance will be covered. Finally, the mediating effect will be investigated.

Hypotheses Development

H1: the relationship between empowering leadership and work performance

H2: the relationship between empowering leadership and challenge stress (work overload)

H3: the relationship betweenfollowers’ challenge stress (work overload) and work performance

H4: the mediating effect of followers’ challenge stress (work overload)

Empowering leadership

I would like to start with the definition of empowering leadership. As stated above, empowering leadership refers to a process of sharing power, and giving more autonomy and responsibilities to followers through a specific set of leader behaviors which includes enhancing the meaningfulness of the job, allowing to do decision making, promoting participation in decision making, and providing autonomy from bureaucratic constraints(Ahearneet al., 2005; Chen et al., 2011; Kirkmanet al., 1999; Zhang et al., 2010). Zhang and Bartol (2010) indicated that higher level of empowering leadership would lead to a more desirable outcomes. Abearne et al. (2015) mentioned that when a leader is doing such empowering behaviors toward followers, followers would have more confident in his or her job. It is because the verbal and emotional support from leaders would result in a higher levels of follows’ self-efficacy, and thus, empowering leadership may have positive impact on follower’s performance in this case. Moreover, they found that empowering leadership has high connection with followers’ creativity via several variables including intrinsic motivation.

Through Vecchio, Justin and Pearce (2010) research, they discovered that empowering leadership is accountable to higher job satisfaction and leader-rated performance of follower. Moreover, they elaborated the positive effects of empowering leadership on follower’s job satisfaction and performance through the mechanism of reduced dysfunctional resistance.

Furthermore, Zhang and Bartol (2010) stated that empowering leadership also has positive impacts on employees’ creativity with some variables including the psychological empowerment, intrinsic motivation and creative process engagement of employees. Therefore, from the result we can see that empowering leadership has positive effective on follower’s work performance. Empowering leadership is beneficial for individual outcomes, and eventually improves the performance of the team or even the whole organization(Mathieu, Gilson, & Ruddy, 2006; Srivastava et al., 2006).

Hypothesis 1. Empowering leadership has positive effect on follower’s work performance.

Follower’s challenge Stress – work overload

Cheong et al. (2015) calmed that “there is a specific de-motivational mechanism, a burdening process, which empowering leadership might also have.” Therefore, although empowering leadership may lead to a better job performance for employees, there might also be some mediators that may lead to a negative relationship between empowering leadership and job performance. In this paper, I am mainly focus on the followers’ challenge stress mechanism, the work overload.

The paper written by Cheong et al. (2015) has proposed the idea of “burdening process of empowering leadership”. They suggest that the empowering leadership may not always be associated with desirable outcomes by referring to the idea of the cost of autonomy suggested by Langfred and Moye (2004). Although some specific characteristics of empowering leadership, like providing autonomy and fostering decision making, could increase follower’s degree of autonomy (Howell, Bowen, Dorfman, Kerr, &Podsakoff, 2007; Langfredet al., 2004), there may also be some undesirable reactions from followers that could result from the increased extent of individual autonomy.

One of the mechanism would be follower’s challenge stress. Leaders who use empowering leadership style tend to give more freedom to their followers, but, this would also somehow increase the workload of the followers as they are required to work and make decision based on their own judgement. On one hand, Langfred&Moye (2004) pointed out that an individual with higher autonomy could be more cognitively distracted from the performance as he or she may engage in more interference and will lead to higher switching costs. They said that individuals with higher degree of job autonomy will have more opportunities to engage in decision making related to task implementation. This would require individuals to search for additional and different information in order to perform the task itself. On the other hand, individuals may have higher opportunities to do more difficult work and make decision that they are not willing to do. This can possibly increase cognitive interference and switching costs, which means, the higher stress for individuals with higher autonomy will be occurred. In this case, empowering leadership not always have positive impact to followers, but also some interference and conflict may occur especially the work overload for followers.

Kahn, Donald, Wolfe, Quinn, & Robert (1964) indicated that, according to role theory, if the behaviors expected of individuals are inconsistent and unclear, the individuals may experience work related stress, become dissatisfied, and being lost in their work role as they are confused about what they should do, and thus, being less effective in performance. Receiving extra assignments and responsibilities from leaders who practice empowering leadership would lead to the interference between follower’s role perception and their actual work that was previously constructed, and hence, increase the work load of followers and stress will be higher while the work performance will be affected (Rizzo, House, &Lirtzman, 1970).

Hypothesis 2: Empowering leadership will lead to heavier workload to followers.

Work Performance

In order to examine the relationship between work overload and performance, I would like to introduce affective force to help me to investigate. Maertz and Campion (2004) imposed that emotion is one of the factors that may affect employee work performance. They think that affective force can be a mediator to explain the relationship between work performance and work overload. When employees are emotionally exhausted, they are devoid of energy and not willing to work. Lee, Mitchell, Sablynski, Burton and Holtom (2004) suggested that employees who experience heightened emotionalexhaustion cannot fulfill their responsibilities and have poor performance in service delivery process.

In addition, in Bakker’s (2005) work, he showed that family-work conflict can also have relationship with emotional exhaustion, which in turn influences employee outcomes. Employees who are incapable of allocating sufficient time and energy to the work role due to family responsibilities suffer from emotional exhaustion, and thus, influence their work performance. If such employees cannot cope with or avoid this affective force, he or she is not tied to people and work, and cannot apply their skills for fulfilling their responsibilities in doing their jobs.

Osman (2005) concluded that emotional exhaustion fully mediates the effect of work overload on (a) job embeddedness and (b) job performance. Therefore, the following hypothesis is proposed:

Hypothesis 3: Workload has negative relationship with employee performance with the mediating effect of emotional exhaustion.

Mediating Effect of Work Overload

In the above information, leaders who practice empowering leadership style tend to give more freedom to their followers. However, this action will cause a lot of stress and pressure toward followers as they have more autonomy on their own work, which in turn, they have to make decision on their own and the workload will be increased. The higher work load would lead to a distraction to followers about their work role, and thus, followers would be confused about what they should and what they are supposed to do.

Moreover, the higher workload has a negative impact to followers as heavier work load will increase the stress and pressure faced by followers as discussed above. In this case, the emotion of followers would also be affected. Followers have less time spending with their family and taking rest, the willingness of performing well in their work will be lower, and eventually, the performance of followers will be affected by the work overload which is occurred by empowering leadership.

Therefore, the following hypothesis will be drawn:

Hypothesis 4: Empowering leadership has negative effective towards followers’ work performance with the mediating effect of work overload.

Methods

In order to reduce the sampling error, data will be collected within the company among all management level, from top management to front line employees. As we know the population in the company, we are using simple random sampling which is also a research method in probability sampling.

We are going to select staff from different management level, e.g. top management, business manager, front line manager, and front line employees, to see whether the empowering leadership of supervisor will affect followers’ performance or not. On one hand, supervisors are responsible to identify their leadership style to interviewer. On the other hand, subordinates are responsible to rate their immediate supervisor’s empowering leadership, and their own job performance under such leadership style.

Research on selected top management will be held in form of face to face interview while research on selected sub-ordinates will be held in form of questionnaire. All the variables will be assessed by using established scales and measured on a seven-point Likert-type scale, ranging from 1 = strongly disagree to 7 = strongly agree.

Expected Results

It is expected that all selected staff in the company will participate in the research and the results will support the hypotheses stated above. The contribution will be: empowering leadership style lead to a heavier work load for sub-ordinates, and thus, followers’ work performance will be affected.