A double-edged sword: empowering leadership to employees’ work-life interface
基于资源保存理论，研究了授权型领导通过工作激情和学习需求等机制对员工工作-生活界面产生的促进和负担双重效应，对管理者和研究者有启示。
Given the strongly held consensus that empowering leadership is beneficial, leadership scholars have overstated its benefits and overlooked its costs. In response to increasing calls for investigation of empowering leadership’s double-edged effects, we uncover the enabling and burdening effects of empowering leadership on employees’ work-life interface by positioning job demands and work passion as important underlying mechanisms. Based on the Conservation of Resources (COR) theory, we contend that via serial mediating roles of learning demands and harmonious passion, empowering leadership may positively relate to employee work enhancement of personal life. Empowering leadership can also predict employee work interference with personal life via serial mediating roles of outcome responsibility and obsessive passion. Four-wave data based on the Indian managerial employees (n = 251) supported our serial mediation hypotheses. Our study provides researchers and practitioners with new insights into the mechanisms explaining the double-edged effects of empowering leadership on employees’ work-life interface.