The Effect of Empowering Leadership on Work Engagement in an Organizational Change Environment. An Investigation of the Mediating Roles of Self-Efficacy and Self-Esteem

As modern organizations seek for changes to enhance their competitive positions and their survivability in global markets, the successful implementation of organizational change has become an important management task. But still, many companies are unable to succeed in change processes. Failures show that there is considerable room for researchers to provide insights into opportunities for improving the success of organizational change events. Given the fact that individuals are the most important units in organizational change, a successful implementation requires employees' acceptance and support. Hence, employees ? positive attitudes and their Work Engagement are considered to be fundamental requirements. Nevertheless, there is limited understanding of the multitudinous factors associated with employees ? decision to support organizational change. Basically, organizational change is stressful as it requires the readiness to embrace change and the readjustment of employees' routine tasks. In this regard, leadership is considered to be one of the most important variables affecting the attitudinal dimension of organizational processes. In respect of the types of leadership behavior and their exchange relationship with followers, several reviews and meta-analyses have shown that Empowering Leadership can result in individual, group and unit performance beyond expectations. Empowering Leadership implies sharing power to foster employees' motivation and engagement in their work. Empowering Leadership emerges when supervisors foster trust-based relationships with followers, show interest in their personal problems, facilitate participative decision-making and coach them to be more self-reliant. These specifications show that this leadership style is highly relevant to Employee Work Engagement. However, relatively few studies have tested how and why Empowering Leadership relates to Follower Work Engagement in organizational change environments.