The Relationship Between Three Types Of Empowerment (Psychological Empowerment, Structural Empowerment And Empowering Leadership) And Contextual Performance: The Role Of Work Engagement As A Mediator

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Date
2016-09
Authors
Ramli, Aznarahayu
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Abstract
This study investigated the three types of empowerment (i.e. psychological empowerment - PE, structural empowerment - SE and empowering leadership - EL) as predictors of contextual performance (CP) and also the mediating effect of work engagement (WE). There are four dimensions of PE which are meaning, competence, self-determination and impact; four dimensions of SE which are opportunity, support, information and resources and two dimensions of EL which are autonomy support and development support. The sample comprised support group employees from local authorities in the northern states of Malaysia. There are 710 set of questionnaires comprising of 65 items was mailed to the Manager of the Management Service Department / Human Resource Department for each of the local authorities. The Manager or his/her representatives then distributed the questionnaire to the support group employees in their organization. Within three months, a total of 540 questionnaires were received. However, a total of 157 of them had to be discarded because they were incomplete and did not meet the criteria required by the study. This brings the number of usable questionnaires of 383 and equivalent to 53.94 %. Data collected were analysed using SmartPLS 3.0 to test the construct validity, convergent validity, discriminant validity, reliability analysis and hypothesis testing. The hypothesis xvi testing for the relationship between the three types of empowerment and CP indicated that, two dimensions of PE (i.e. meaning and competence), three dimensions of SE (i.e. opportunity, information and support) and one dimension of EL (i.e. autonomy support) were significantly related to CP. On the other hand, the hypothesis testing on the relationship between the three types of empowerment and WE indicated that, one dimension of PE (i.e. meaning), one dimension of SE (i.e. resources) and two dimensions of EL (i.e. autonomy support and development support) were significantly related to WE. The hypothesis result also found the significant relationship between WE and CP. For the hypothesis testing regarding the mediating effect of WE, the results indicated that WE mediate the relationship between one dimension of PE (i.e. meaning), one dimension of SE (i.e. resources) and one dimension of EL (i.e. autonomy support) and CP. The result of this study suggested that empowering the employees is important in order for them to foster positive job attitudes in term of work engagement and positive job behaviour in term of contextual performance. Special attention should be given on the meaning and competence dimensions of PE, opportunity, support and information dimensions of SE and autonomy support of EL which were found to have significant effects on employees’ contextual performance. The theoretical relationships posited in this research model were empirically supported. Specifically, this study confirms the linkage between the three types of empowerment, work engagement, and contextual performance. Practically, the result of this study offer several suggestions to human resources manager and top management in Malaysian public service sector especially local authorities. This study further proposed that the organization should promote empowered working environment to increase the employees’ engagement with their job and encourage them to voluntarily perform beyond their prescribe role requirements. In this regard, employees’ training, systematic succession planning system and employees’ involvement in the decision-making process and policies development are some of the activities that the organization might implement to empower the employees that lead to enhance their WE and CP.
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This study investigated the three types of empowerment , also the mediating effect of work engagement
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