Empowering leadership in crisis: a natural experiment
通过一项自然实验，研究发现公共卫生危机期间赋能型领导对员工福祉的正面作用减弱，甚至可能产生负面影响，挑战了其普遍有效的观点。
Existing research suggests that empowering leadership enhances employee well-being, but context-specific empirical studies in the public sector remain scarce. We investigated whether this positive impact persists during a public health crisis. To test this, we conducted a natural experiment, utilizing a longitudinal survey of healthcare employees and administrative data on geographical variance in hospitalization rates during a public health crisis. Our findings show that empowering leadership is less effective during a crisis and can even result in adverse effects. The results challenge the notion that empowering leadership universally benefits employee well-being and highlight its potential dark side.