The hidden dark side of empowering leadership

Most of the theories and research on empowering leadership to date focuses on how leadership focused on empowerment affects employees, almost always portraying these behaviors as positive. We distance ourselves from this general view and focus on the potential disadvantages of empowering leadership for employees.

Specifically, we propose that hindrance stressors create a reversing effect, such that empowering leadership increases (vs. decreases) moral disengagement when hindrance stressors are higher (vs. lower).

More specifically, we argue that impeding stressors can have an inverse effect, such that empowering leadership actually increases (rather than decreases) moral disengagement when these stressors are higher (rather than lower).

Ultimately, we argue that empowering leadership can have a positive or negative indirect impact on UPB via moral disengagement. Our predictions are supported by:

• We find support for our predictions in both a time-lagged field study (Study 1);
• and a scenario-based experiment using an anagram cheating task (Study 2)

We thus highlight the impact that empowering leadership can have on unethical behavior, providing answers to both why and when the dark side of empowering leadership behavior occurs.