The Effect of Empowering Leadership on Employees’ Work Engagement : Psychological Ownership as A Mediator, Individualistic-Collectivistic Value Orientation as A Moderator

Empowering leadership involves sharing power with a view toward enhancing employees’ motivation and investment in their work, there are major reasons to expect empowering leadership to have a positive impact on work engagement. Therefore, a major purpose of this study was to build proposed model that addresses the connection between empowering leadership and work engagement. We further drew on the psychological ownership literature to posit mediating mechanisms with high potential to help explain linkages between empowering leadership and work engagement. Empowering leader provides an employee with autonomy and prospects for self-determination by encouraging the individual to decide how to carry out his or her job. Empowering leader fosters an employee’s participation in decision making. This process potentially gives an employee a feeling of greater control over the immediate work situation and an enhanced sense that his or her own behaviors can make a difference in work results, thus promoting the sense of impact. Thus, it is reasonable to argue that empowering leadership influences a employees’ perceptions of work engagement. Theoretical arguments have suggested that psychological ownership, in turn, makes a critical contribution to employees’ work engagement. This connection is important because, conceptually, psychological ownership is considered to be a well-established predictor of work engagement. Psychological ownership is the extent to which an individual is interested in a task and engages in it for the sake of the task itself. Also we suggested individualistic and collectivistic value orientation moderate between empowering leadership and psychological ownership. If empowering leader who are give the powers and expected to take charge, and to know what is right, participative decision making leading ownership influence may be seen as more strong and effectual in collectivistic value oriented employees than individualistic value oriented employees. Collectivistic value orientation are expected to be more prone to identify with their leaders' goals and the common purpose or shared vision of the group and organization and typically exhibit high levels of loyalty and then collectivists tend to have a stronger attachment to their organizations as related psychological ownership. However, individualistic value orientation are more likely to engage in behaviors that may benefit themselves due to their motivation to satisfy their own personal self-interests and immediate gratification of needs and emphasize personal outcomes and value competitiveness, autonomy, and achievement. Finally, we suggested moderated mediation role of psychological ownership. If high on value orientation more opportunities for leaders to take charge, communicate, and influence on their possession feeling and thus provides cues consistent with the energetic and assertive tendencies of empowering leaders. By giving leaders the freedom to plan and decide how work is to be done, cultural value orientation are directly relevant to the organized and planful tendencies of conscientious individuals; thus, they accentuate the role of psychological ownership in explaining the relationship. We expected individualistic and collectivistic value orientation moderate the strength of the mediated relationship between empowering leadership and work engagement such as mediation of psychological ownership will be stronger under high on value orientation than under low on value orientation. Based on the proposed model and propositions, we discuss of empowering leadership theory expand for management at organization on reflected employees’ psychological ownership, work engagement and individualistic and collectivistic value orientation.