The Relationship between Empowering Leadership, Work Characteristics, and Work Engagement among Academics: A SEM Mediation Analysis

Eyvind Helland; Marit Christensen; Siw Tone Innstrand

doi:10.16993/sjwop.84

The Relationship between Empowering Leadership, Work Characteristics, and Work Engagement among Academics: A SEM Mediation Analysis

Scandinavian Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology

Volume 5 (2020): Issue 1

By: Eyvind Helland, Marit Christensen and Siw Tone Innstrand

Open Access

|Oct 2020

Abstract

Using theories of empowering leadership, empowerment and social exchange, this paper aims to add to the literature on leadership in higher education by exploring how and why empowering leadership is linked to academics’ work engagement through mediation of work characteristics that are crucial to academics: job autonomy, social community at work, recognition, and unreasonable tasks. To investigate this, data from a cross-sectional survey of N = 3759 (n = 3059) academics and doctoral research fellows from three major Norwegian universities were analyzed using structural equation modeling. The results show that empowering leadership is related to academics’ work engagement through the following work characteristics: job autonomy, social community at work, and unreasonable tasks. Empowering leadership was also related to academics’ recognition, but recognition was not, in turn, associated with work engagement. Future researchers may consider prospective, experimental, and qualitative designs to extend the results of this study.

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Articles in this issue

DOI: https://doi.org/10.16993/sjwop.84 | Journal eISSN: 2002-2867

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Language: English

Page range: 11 - 11

Submitted on: Feb 12, 2019

Accepted on: Oct 5, 2020

Published on: Oct 29, 2020

Published by: Stockholm University Press

In partnership with: Paradigm Publishing Services

Keywords:

Academia,

higher education,

empowering leadership,

autonomy,

motivation,

work engagement

© 2020 Eyvind Helland, Marit Christensen, Siw Tone Innstrand, published by Stockholm University Press
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Volume 5 (2020): Issue 1