Effects of Empowering Leadership on Employee Voice Behavior: The Mediating Role of Psychological Empowerment

Abstract

Over the past two decades many organizations are moving towards decentralization approach and hence putting in much effort to ensure that employees acquire the necessary leadership skills. Many organizations have adopted managerial attempts that aim to strengthen and empower leaders to boost organizational performance. Several educational researchers have exploited the relationship that exist between empowering leadership, psychological empowerment. The purpose of this research was to analyze the effects that empowering leadership can have on employee voice behavior, with the mediating role of psychological empowerment. The technique used to gather responses from 151 respondents was mainly quantitative research approach with questionnaires as a tool. The study employed random sampling to involve respondents in the study. Multiple operations such as correlation matrix, regression analysis and bootstrap approach were conducted to analyze data collected from the questionnaire. The findings showed a positive correlation between the variables measured. All hypotheses tested revealed a significant positive relationship between empowering leadership and voice behavior, psychological empowerment and voice behavior, and the mediating role of psychological empowerment. This study is useful in the academic, industrial and organizational sector. Organizations can use it to employ empowering leadership and measure the change in the behavior of employees, attitude, motivation, and empowerment. In terms of academia, this research opens more doors to further investigate the relationship between these variables. The limitations of the study include purely quantitative means of analysis and the use of random sampling. Future researchers can get more insights by employing a qualitative technique and adding more variables to further define the relationship and get better insights.