The Hidden Dark Side of Empowering Leadership: The Moderating Role of Hindrance Stressors in Explaining When Empowering Employees Can Promote Moral Disengagement and Unethical Pro-Organizational Behavior

The majority of theory and research on empowering leadership to date has focused on how empowering leader behaviors influence employees, portraying those behaviors as almost exclusively beneficial. We depart from this predominant consensus to focus on the potential detriments of empowering leadership for employees. Drawing from the social cognitive theory of morality, we propose that empowering leadership can unintentionally increase employees' unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB), and that it does so by increasing their levels of moral disengagement. 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). Ultimately, we argue for a positive or negative indirect effect of empowering leadership on UPB through moral disengagement. 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.

Automated summary

The majority of research on empowering leadership has focused on the positive effects, but we shift the focus to the potential detriments. We propose that empowering leadership can unintentionally increase employees' unethical pro-organizational behavior by increasing moral disengagement. We find support for our predictions in both a time-lagged field study and a scenario-based experiment. Our findings highlight the impact of empowering leadership on unethical behavior and provide insights into when and why the dark side of this leadership behavior occurs.