Empowerment and creativity: A cross-level investigation

Drawing upon social learning and self-determination theories, we hypothesized and tested a chain mediating process linking empowerment to employee creativity. Based on data from 385 employees working with 104 supervisors in multiple organizations in China, we conducted cross-level path analyses and found that (1) structural empowerment partially mediated the relationship between transformational leadership and psychological empowerment, (2) psychological empowerment fully mediated the relationship between structural empowerment and creativity, and (3) structural and psychological empowerment sequentially mediates the relationship between transformational leadership and creativity. This study integrated different perspectives of empowerment and provides important insights into the mechanisms linking empowerment with creativity. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.