Linking empowering leadership to employee innovation: The mediating role of work engagement

Abstract

We investigated empowering leadership as a predictor of employee innovative behavior, with work engagement as a mediator in this relationship. Data were collected from 318 employees and their supervisors in China, and we used structural equation modeling to evaluate our hypotheses. The results suggest that empowering leadership was positively related to employee innovative behavior, and that work engagement partially mediated this relationship. Our findings provide new insight into the effects of empowering leadership on employee innovation, and indicate that it is beneficial for leaders to pay attention to empowering behavior and, in doing so, consider employees' engagement at work.