Too Much of a Good Thing? The Curvilinear Effects of Empowering Leadership on Employee Well-being

Leaders are encouraged to empower employees in recent public sector management reforms. However, it remains unclear whether the influence of empowering leadership on employee outcomes is linearly favorable. Grounded in the “too-much-of-a-good-thing” effect and conservation of resources theory, we develop a model considering a potential curvilinear relationship between empowering leadership and public employees’ well-being. Using data from a multisource, time-lagged survey of 496 employees and their 97 supervisors from a prefecture-level city government in China, we find that (1) empowering leadership has a curvilinear (inverted U-shaped) relationship with employee well-being; (2) perceived responsibility mediates this relationship; and (3) public service motivation moderates the curvilinear effect of perceived responsibility on employee well-being and the indirect effect of empowering leadership on employee well-being via perceived responsibility. Implications of these findings for public management research and practice are discussed.