When people feel empowered at work, it is associated with stronger job performance, job satisfaction, and commitment to the organization. Many leaders today often try to empower their employees by delegating authority and decision-making, sharing information, and asking for their input. This style of leadership works best in motivating certain types of performance and certain types of employees. "Empowering" leaders should know when they can be most effective.

As a recommendation, look at an empowering leadership style to improve job performance, together with the different types of performance, such as routine task performance, organizational citizenship behavior, and creativity. Also look for several mechanisms that might explain how this type of leadership would improve job performance - for example, were these effects caused by increased feelings of empowerment, or by increased trust in one's leader? Finally, explores whether leaders who focused on empowering employees influenced employee job performance equally across different national cultures, industries, and levels of employee experience.

Empowering leaders have more creative and helpful employees.

Leaders who are perceived as more empowering are more likely to delegate authority to their employees, ask for their input, and encourage autonomous decision-making. And they are more likely to have employees who are rated, by either their leader or colleagues, as being highly creative and good organizational citizens.

Feeling empowered doesn't always boost routine task performance.

Empowering leaders are linked to good employee performance on routine, core job tasks - but they aren't much different from non-empowering leaders. There is also a great deal of variation: sometimes leaders who try to empower their employees end up doing more harm than good. For instance, by trying to provide employees with additional responsibility and challenges at work, empowering leaders burdened their employees and increased their level of job stress. The empowering leaders who did see better performance on routine tasks were the ones who developed good relationship with their employees and were more trusted.

Empowerment is about supporting employees.

Overall, empowering leadership can motivate employees and fuel their creativity, but it can also do additional burdens and stress that may hurt their routine performance. It is crucial for managers to understand that empowering leadership has its limits and that factors like trust and experience affect how their behaviors are perceived.