The Moderating Role of Employees’ Psychological Strain in the Empowering Leadership—proactive Performance Relationship.

Empowering leadership (EL) engages employees to act autonomously and to take responsibility for bringing improvements to the workplace. Therefore, EL is positively related to proactive performance (PP). However, recent meta-analysis found some variability in the relationships between EL and performance outcomes (Kim et al., Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, 2018, 25(3), 257-276), suggesting the presence of moderators. Based on the idea that EL requires employees' resource investment, it is likely that employees who already face high levels of strain will be overwhelmed in the presence of EL, hence decreasing their propensity to subsequently adopt proactive behaviors. This moderating effect would depend on behavioral dimensions subsumed in the EL construct; therefore, it is important to focus on EL behaviors rather than on the global construct. Accordingly, in this study, we investigated EL behaviors' contribution to PP while considering employees' psychological strain (PS) as a moderating factor. We hypothesized that EL behaviors oriented toward employees' autonomy would have no benefits when employees have high levels of PS, as opposed to EL behaviors oriented toward employees' development. A total of 625 workers participated in this study, relying on a time-lagged design and self-reported questionnaires. Latent moderated regression analyses revealed that PS decreased the relationship between EL behaviors oriented toward autonomy and subsequent PP. In contrast, the relationship between EL behaviors oriented toward employees' development and PP remained significant under a high level of PS. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed.