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Ethical leadership and work engagement: The roles of psychological empowerment and power distance orientation

Israr Ahmad (School of Management, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China)
Yongqiang Gao (School of Management, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China)

Management Decision

ISSN: 0025-1747

Article publication date: 30 April 2018

Issue publication date: 10 September 2018

4162

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the mediating role of psychological empowerment in the relationship between ethical leadership and employee work engagement as well as the moderating effect of power distance orientation.

Design/methodology/approach

With a multi-wave survey, this paper uses a sample of 251 employees from the banking sector in Pakistan to test the hypotheses.

Findings

The results reveal that psychological empowerment partially mediates the relationship between ethical leadership and employee work engagement. Besides, power distance orientation mitigates the positive relationship between ethical leadership and psychological empowerment as well as the indirect effect of ethical leadership on employee work engagement via psychological empowerment.

Originality/value

This study contributes to the existing ethical leadership literature by identifying psychological empowerment as an additional mediator and power distance orientation as a boundary condition, in the relationship between ethical leadership and employee work engagement.

Keywords

Citation

Ahmad, I. and Gao, Y. (2018), "Ethical leadership and work engagement: The roles of psychological empowerment and power distance orientation", Management Decision, Vol. 56 No. 9, pp. 1991-2005. https://doi.org/10.1108/MD-02-2017-0107

Publisher

:

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2018, Emerald Publishing Limited

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