Editorial summary. This is our text summary of an article published by frontiers. Charts, figures, and the author’s full voice are at the original — read it there .
Licence. The original is licensed under CC BY 4.0. This page adapts it: the summary and analysis are ours, not the authors’.
Editorial verdict
Methodologically sound academic study with meaningful findings on empowering leadership and voice, but single-organisation, single-culture, cross-sectional design limits generalisability — treat the directional findings as credible but the effect sizes as tentative.
Executive summary
This study examines the psychological mechanisms through which empowering leadership promotes employee voice behaviour in organisational settings. Drawing on self-determination theory, the authors propose that harmonious passion — an autonomous form of work motivation in which employees willingly internalise their work as part of their identity — mediates the relationship between empowering leadership and voice. The study further tests job autonomy as a moderator that amplifies this mediated pathway. Using a sample of 674 supervisor–subordinate dyads from a large Chinese energy group, the study finds that empowering leadership is positively associated with both harmonious passion and employee voice, that harmonious passion partially mediates this relationship, and that job autonomy strengthens the link between harmonious passion and voice, thereby enhancing the overall indirect effect. The study controls for transformational leadership, psychological safety, obsessive passion, and demographic variables. Limitations include a cross-sectional design, a single Chinese organisation, dyadic rather than team-level analysis, and the exclusion of psychological empowerment as a competing mediator. The findings point to the interactive role of leader behaviour and job design in enabling employee voice.
Key insights
- 1Harmonious passion — autonomous, identity-integrated motivation — mediates the relationship between empowering leadership and employee voice, offering a more nuanced alternative to the intrinsic/extrinsic motivation dichotomy.
- 2Job autonomy acts as a boundary condition: the positive effect of harmonious passion on voice is significantly stronger when employees have high job autonomy, and the indirect effect of empowering leadership on voice via harmonious passion is statistically significant only under high-autonomy conditions.
- 3Empowering leadership retains a significant positive association with employee voice even after controlling for transformational leadership, suggesting it explains unique variance in voice behaviour beyond general inspirational leader behaviours.
Practical takeaways
- Organisations seeking to increase employee voice may find that combining empowering leadership behaviours (power-sharing, expressing confidence, enhancing work meaningfulness) with high-autonomy job designs produces stronger effects than either intervention alone.
- Framing employee motivation in terms of harmonious passion — helping employees internalise their work as part of their identity — offers managers an alternative diagnostic lens to the traditional intrinsic/extrinsic motivation distinction when designing engagement or voice initiatives.
Frameworks mentioned
Self-Determination Theory
A motivation theory distinguishing intrinsic from extrinsic motivation and positing a controlled-to-autonomous continuum of motivation internalization; used here as the primary theoretical lens linking empowering leadership to voice via harmonious passion.
Job Characteristics Model
Hackman and Oldham's model of job design, from which the job autonomy construct and its three-item scale are drawn; used to operationalise situational strength in the moderated mediation model.
References
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- Morrison (2014).Employee voice behavior: Integration and directions for future research.
- Liang et al. (2012).On the development and function of psychological safety: Exploring the work of Amy Edmondson.
- Jiang et al. (2018).Voice efficacy and employee voice.
- Raub and Robert (2012).Psychological empowerment and employee voice.
- Vallerand et al. (2003).A dualistic model of passion: Harmonious and obsessive passion.
- Vallerand and Miquelon (2007).Harmonious passion, obsessive passion, and subjective well-being.
- Liu et al. (2011).Passion at work and creativity.
- Luh and Lu (2012).Creativity and harmonious passion.
- Ho et al. (2018).Harmonious passion and employee voice.
- Ahearne et al. (2005).Empowering leadership and managerial performance: A new approach.
- Srivastava et al. (2006).Empowering leadership in management teams: Effects on knowledge sharing, efficacy, and performance.
- Zhang and Bartol (2010).Unlocking the mask: A look at the process by which authentic leaders impact follower attitudes and behaviors.
- Seibert et al. (2004).Antecedents and consequences of empowerment in the service environment.
- Seibert et al. (2011).Antecedents and consequences of psychological and team empowerment in organizations: A meta-analytic review.
- Deci and Ryan (2000).Motivation and self-determination of human behavior.
- LePine and Van Dyne (1998).A motivational basis of organizational citizenship behavior.
- Hackman and Oldham (1975).Motivation, leadership, and organization: Do American theories apply abroad?.
- Preacher and Hayes (2008).Using the bootstrapping macro for mediation and moderated mediation analysis.
Source & Provenance
frontiers
Ang Gao, Jing Jiang
July 16, 2019
Research Study
Asia-Pacific
Original source metadata is preserved. AI analysis is generated separately.
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