How Empowering Leadership Can Improve New Employee Engagement: The Mediating Role of Employee Perceptions of Insider Status

Abstract

One of the critical concerns for the company to increase its competitiveness is how to better engage new employees, who play a significant role in driving the sustainable development of the enterprise. Based on the analysis of questionnaire data from 206 new employees in Zhejiang IT firms, the empirical results found that empowered leadership enhances new employees’ work engagement by enhancing their perception of insider status. Specifically speaking, empowered leadership significantly and positively influences new employees’ engagement, perceptions of insider status play a partially mediating role, and the association between perceptions of insider status and new hire engagement is positively moderated by trait-based promotion regulatory focus. The study provides theoretical support for empowering leadership as a proven method of organizational socialization.