Perceived Benefits and Costs of Empowerment: Conceptualization,Measure Development,and Its Impact on Empowering Leadership

Abstract

Despite the benefits associated with empowering employees, some leaders are reluctant to do so. From a decision-making perspective, this may be due to leaders’ perception that empowerment also has potential costs. In this manuscript, we frame the role of leader as decision-maker, advancing the idea that empowering leadership behavior is a function of leaders’ perceptions of both the benefits and costs of empowerment. Using five unique samples of supervisors (and, in two samples, their direct reports), we identify the specific content areas associated with leaders’ perceptions of the benefits and costs of empowerment, create and validate measures of perceived benefits and costs, and test its relationship with empowering leadership. Results revealed five categories of perceived benefits and six categories of perceived costs of empowerment and provided support for the factor structure and reliability of our measures. Results from two field studies provide mixed support for the relationship between perceptions of empowerment's benefits and costs and empowering leadership; although perceived costs consistently influenced empowerment behaviors, perceived benefits were significantly related to empowerment behaviors in one sample but not the other. We discuss implications of these findings for empowering leadership research and theory, and managerial practice.