Empowerment process approach to proactivity: Flexible work arrangements and empowering leadership

The present study aims to contribute to the HRM-debate by extending insights from the empowerment literature incorporating leadership to explain employees’ proactive workplace behavior. More specifically, we investigate how flexible work arrangements (job autonomy, time-spatial flexibility and access to ICT) and empowering leadership motivate employees to engage in proactive workplace behavior, by explicating the mediating role of psychological empowerment in these relationships. Most studies directly link either empowering Hr practices or leadership to workplace proactivity. We employed PLS Structural Equation Modeling to analyse survey data of 427 knowledge workers in a large financial organization. The results suggested that employees’ psychological empowerment mediates the relationships between, on the one hand, job autonomy and empowering leadership, and on the other, workplace proactivity. However, neither for time-spatial flexibility or access to ICT mediating effects were found. Our ‘extended empowerment process approach’ helped to disentangle the motivating elements of innovative workplace designs and showed that both job autonomy, as a HR practice, and empowering leadership can foster employees’ workplace proactivity through psychological empowerment. Moreover we found empirical evidence for psychological empowerment as a crucial mechanism in the empowerment process.