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
Loading...
Date
2016-09
Authors
Ramli, Aznarahayu
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
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.
Description
Keywords
This study investigated the three types of empowerment , also the mediating effect of work engagement