Psychological Empowerment: An Academic Research

This study, which is based on a PhD thesis; examines, with an integrative perspective, the effects of employees’ perceptions about the empowering behavior of their immediate supervisor on employees’ psychological empowerment, and the effects of employees’ psychological empowerment on their job satisfaction, extrinsic reward satisfaction, affective commitment towards their organizations, turnover intentions; and task performance and organizational citizenship behavior. In addition, this study makes comparisons between the strength of some of the hypothesized relationships.

The primary finding of the study is that there is a strong relationship between enhancing meaningfulness- providing autonomy dimension of empowering behavior of supervisors and employees’ psychological empowerment. Another important finding is that there are positive relationships between empowering behavior of supervisors and employees’ job satisfaction, extrinsic reward satisfaction, and affective commitment.

The results also indicate that the impact of empowerment on job satisfaction is stronger than that on extrinsic reward satisfaction, and the impact of job satisfaction on turnover intention is stronger than that of extrinsic reward satisfaction. Finally, there are negative influences of empowerment on employees’ task performance and organizational citizenship behavior.