Empowering Leadership and Proactive Behavior: Mediating Role of Psychological Empowerment and Moderating Role of Leader-Follower Distance

Abstract

This study investigates the effect of empowering behavior of leader on followers' proactive behavior. It was also proposed that such an effect will be mediated by psychological empowerment, whereas, leader-follower distance was proposed to inversely moderate the direct effect of empowering leadership. The setting for this study was the Hospitality industry in Pakistan. Survey data was collected from managerial level employees working in hotels in Islamabad and Lahore,Pakistan. Dyadic data were gathered from 311 1-1 supervisor-subordinate dyads. Data were analyzed in two steps. First, the measurement model was assessed for reliability and validity. Common method variance was assessed with the help of common latent factor method. Second, direct and indirect effects were tested using structural regression. Test of moderation was performed using Process Macro in SPSS. Results show that empowering leadership had a significant effect on proactive behavior. The effect of empowering leadership was partially mediated by psychological empowerment. It was found that leader-follower distance had an inverse moderating effect. In the end, implications for theory and practice have been discussed. Keywords: Empowering leadership, Proactive behavior, psychological empowerment, leaderfollower distance