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The purpose of this paper is to enhance the understanding of consumer empowerment in the relationship between consumers and service providers. It draws on self-efficacy theory to conceptualize consumer empowerment and explain the impact on perceived performance risk in insurance decision making.

This study employs data collected from an online survey involving 487 consumers in Switzerland, who recently decided on an insurance service. A structural equation model quantifies both the psychological effects on consumers’ perception of insurance services and behavioral effects on their decision-making process.

Perceived consumer empowerment is conceptualized by perceived self-efficacy and perceived controllability. Both have a significant impact on perceived performance risk, while the former is partially mediated by the preference to delegate the decision to a surrogate. Moreover, customers’ involvement in the purchase process moderates both the direct and indirect effect of perceived self-efficacy on perceived performance risk.

The results are based on consumers’ perceptions from a single country. Furthermore, consumers’ perceptions were surveyed with a time lag after the decision-making process. To increase rigor, perceptions should be collected during decision making.

Results show that consumer empowerment can be employed as a risk reduction strategy. Consumers with self-efficacy and controllability beliefs perceive significantly less performance risk; however, practitioners should consider that consumers are also motivated to make decisions independently rather than delegating their decisions. Furthermore, consumer empowerment depends on consumer will. For largely indifferent consumers, empowerment does not affect risk or decision delegation preference.

The study is among the few empirical works to examine the effects of consumer empowerment on the consumer-service provider relationship on an individual level. Furthermore, applying consumer empowerment in relationship marketing implies a shift in research focus to the question of how consumers construe decision-making situations rather than objectively measuring the state of consumer relationship.

This paper combines the literature on knowledge transfer and that on organizational behavior to analyze how perceived empowerment and perceived engagement affect knowledge transfer offices’ (KTOs’) performance, measured in terms of the number of license agreements.

The authors measured the cognitions which constitute perceived empowerment and perceived engagement through a survey sent to Italian KTOs’ professionals. The authors performed “fuzzy set qualitative analysis” to investigate if this cognition, together or in isolation, may influence KTOs’ management performance, measured by the number of license agreements.

The results highlight the role of individual cognitions in influencing KTOs’ performance. Furthermore, an important finding from the analysis of the main configurations is that the co-presence of perceived engagement and perceived empowerment leads to more license agreements only in the presence of specific individual cognitions. More precisely, the level of organizational citizenship behavior, the degree to which an individual influences results at work (degree of impact) and the value of a work goal (degree of meaning) are the cognitions which lead to a higher number of license agreements.

Despite the growing interest in the investigation of the determinants of KTOs’ performance, a relevant research gap still concerns the explanation of KTOs’ performance considering individual cognitions such as attitudes, norms, perceived behavioral control and intentions. This study looks at the combined effect of the individual cognition of perceived engagement and perceived empowerment on KTOs’ performances.

Examines the relationship between empowerment, desire to be empowered and perceived control among professional nursing staff in a small healthcare institution where recent attempts at empowerment have had limited success. A sample of 31 nurses and nursing assistants was used to test hypotheses that there is a positive relationship between perceived control and empowerment and that this relationship is moderated in a positive direction by desire to be empowered. Questionnaires measuring the four dimensions (meaning, competence, self‐determination, impact) of empowerment and desire to be empowered as well as work locus of control were administered to subjects. Results support the hypothesized relationship between perceived control and empowerment. However, that between desire to be empowered and empowerment was not supported. Implications of these findings are discussed including several possible ways of increasing perceived control in specific situations. These include changing some organizational, supervisory style, reward system and job design factors.

The purpose of this study is to examine the mediating role of perceived procedural justice and interactional justice on the relationship between moral leadership and the four psychological empowerment dimensions manifested in individuals' perceptions of meaning, competence, self‐determination, and impact.

Data from 241 subordinates, who reported to 110 supervisors, were collected from clothing companies in southern mainland China. The subordinates responded to a self‐report survey, which consisted of the variables of interest. Because of the nature of nested data, hierarchical linear regression (HLM 6.0) was used for analysis.

A fully mediated model of perceived justice was supported. Procedural justice and interactional justice were found to be differentially associated with the elements of psychological empowerment. Specifically, while perceived procedural justice accounted for more unique variance in the empowerment facets of meaning, competence, and impact, perceived interactional justice accounted for more unique variance in the facet of self‐determination.

This study contributes to the literature by first examining the relationships among moral leadership, two types of perceived justice, and the four empowerment dimensions in the Chinese context. A detailed discussion of the implication for both researchers and practitioners is also provided.

The current study aimed to examine the moderating role of perceived supervisor support in the nexus between employee empowerment and organizational commitment in the Ghanaian hospitality industry.

A quantitative research design was adopted, and data were collected from 274 frontline workers from 4-star and 5-star hotels at two different waves within a 7-month interval. The data received were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics with the aid of Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS V. 23.0) and SmartPLS (V.4.0), respectively.

As hypothesized in the study, employee empowerment was significantly related to organizational commitment. Furthermore, the results revealed that perceived supervisor support moderated the nexus between employee empowerment and affective and continuance commitment but did not moderate the nexus between employee empowerment and normative commitment.

Arguably, support from supervisors has been theoretically identified as a key construct in enhancing subordinates' commitment to an organization. However, less is known in the literature about the moderating role of perceived supervisory support in the nexus between employee empowerment and organizational commitment, especially in the Ghanaian hospitality industry.

Delivering patient-centered healthcare is now seen as one of the basic requirements of good quality care. In this research, the impact of the perceived quality of three experiential dimensions (Physical Environment, Empowerment and Dignity and Patient–Doctor Relationship) on patient's Experiential Satisfaction is assessed.

259 structured interviews were performed with patients in private and public hospitals across Italy. The research methodology is based in testing mediation and moderation effects of the selected variables.

The study shows that: perceived quality of Physical Environment has a positive impact on patient's Experiential Satisfaction; perceived quality of Empowerment and Dignity and perceived quality of Patient–Doctor Relationship mediate this relationship reinforcing the role of Physical Environment on Experiential Satisfaction; educational level is a moderator in the relationship between perceived quality of Patient–Doctor Relationship and overall Satisfaction: more educated patients pay more attention to relational items. Subjective Health Frailty is a moderator in all the tested relationships with Experiential Satisfaction: patients who perceive their health as frail are more reactive to the quality of the above-mentioned variables.

Physical Environment items are enablers of both Empowerment and Dignity and Patient–Doctor Relationship and these variables must be addressed all together in order to improve the value proposition provided to patients. Designing a hospital, beyond technical requirements that modern medicine demands and functional relationships between different medical departments, means dealing with issues like the anxiety of the patient, the stressful working environment for the hospital staff and the need to build a sustainable and healing building.

Purpose: The aim of the study is to consider the use of the Internet as a potential facilitator of positive health-related perceptions. Specifically, we propose that online health information seeking fosters positive perceptions of health. Using path modeling, we theorized several mechanisms through which information seeking could be conducive to positive health perceptions, which we conceptualized into the following four dimensions: (1) sense of empowerment in managing health, (2) self-reported ability to take better care of health, (3) sense of improved health-related quality of life, and (4) self-reported improvement of health.

Methodology: Our sample consisted of respondents who have used the Internet as a resource for health information (n = 710), drawn from the largest national probability-based online research panel. Our comparison subsample consisted of older respondents (age ≥ 60; n = 194). We used Internet-specific measures and employed structural equation models (SEM) to estimate the direct, indirect, and total effects of health-related use of the Internet on subjective health perceptions. Based on our review of the literature, competent health communication with healthcare providers and sense of empowerment in managing personal health were modeled as mediator variables. We assessed whether the proposed mediational relationships, if significant, differed across our indicators of positive health perceptions and whether any differential associations were observed among older adults. We run parallel models for each indicator of positive health perception.

Findings: Provider-patient communication informed by the Internet resources were perceived to impart a greater sense of empowerment to manage health among our respondents, which in turn, was associated with perceived contributions to better self-reported ability to provide self-care, increased health-related quality of life, and improvement in self-reported health. The SEM results revealed a good fit with our full sample and subsample.

Research Implications: Conceptualization of the multidimensional aspects of online health information seeking with separate multi-indicator analyses of the outcome variable is important to further our understanding of how technology may impact the pathways involved in influencing health perceptions and as a result health outcomes.

The paper aims to investigate the mediating effect of teacher empowerment on the relationship between teachers' perception of their school support and their intrinsic and extrinsic job satisfaction.

Data were collected from a sample of 2,565 teachers affiliated with 153 Israeli elementary schools. A path analysis procedure was employed to test the mediating effect of teacher empowerment on the relation between perceived organizational support and job satisfaction.

The results reveal that teacher empowerment mediated the relations between perceived organizational support and satisfaction, adding more than 30 per cent to the explained variance of each of the satisfaction types. Teacher empowerment shows different relationships when intrinsic versus extrinsic type of satisfaction is considered. The most influential dimension of empowerment predicting teacher intrinsic satisfaction is self‐efficacy, a psychologically oriented variable, while the most powerful dimension of empowerment predicting extrinsic job satisfaction is earned status and respect, a sociologically oriented variable.

The results reinforce the notion that both types of job satisfaction are two different entities that should be addressed differently. Taking a theoretical perspective, it appears that teacher empowerment should be conceived as a multi‐dimensional scale, where its various components are differently associated with the two types of satisfaction.

Moreover, it seems that teacher empowerment has a much stronger impact on teacher satisfaction when it takes place in an organizational context that supports individuals. Hence, school leaders need to focus on different qualities of teacher empowerment, depending on the qualities of satisfaction that they wish to promote.

Little is known about perceived organizational support in the educational realm. Studying it in relation with teacher empowerment and job satisfaction, key concepts in the school arena, is unprecedented.

Internal employees of firms are a reliable source of information for potential job seekers. However, few studies have focused on why internal employees actively recommend their firms. Based on the social exchange theory, this study aims to construct a chain mediation model using perceived challenge stress and employee experience as mediators to explore how leadership empowerment behavior affects employee referrals.

Bootstrap repeated sampling analysis was conducted on a sample of 307 employees collected through two-time points.

Leadership empowerment behavior is positively related to employee referrals; perceived challenge stress and employee experience mediate the effect of leadership empowerment behavior on employee referrals, respectively; in addition, perceived challenge stress and employee experience play a chain mediating role between leadership empowerment behavior and employee referrals.

The findings can help provide insight into the drivers of employee referrals and can effectively guide organization reputation management.

The purpose of the article is to examine the validity and reliability of Spreitzer's and Menon's instruments in a culturally diverse environment. To test whether individualized measures of Hofstede's cultural dimensions are related to employee empowerment in the Greek context.

To investigate the multidimensional nature of the empowerment construct and the discriminant validity and reliability of its basic dimensions principal component analysis with varimax rotation is conducted. Furthermore, correlation analysis is employed to examine the relationship between empowerment, power distance and uncertainty avoidance and to compare current with existing findings. The analysis is based on valid responses from 154 Greek employed students to self‐administered surveys.

Overall, the results of the present study are congruent with the literature in the area, confirming the usefulness of a view of empowerment characterized by the dimensions of perceived control (or impact), perceived competence, and goal internalization (or meaning). Furthermore, the level of psychological empowerment in this investigation compares quite favorably with reported findings from Canada, the USA and Australia. Finally, whereas uncertainty avoidance is significantly positively associated with overall empowerment and all of its sub‐scales, contrary to expectations, power distance is unrelated to feelings of empowerment.

Although the results, in line with existing findings, seem to confirm the cross‐national validity and reliability of the Spreitzer and Menon instruments, they also tentatively indicate the potential relativity of the empowerment concept in non‐American settings – especially in terms of its important determinants. Future research should aim to refine the discriminant validity of Spreitzer's sub‐scale of self‐determination. Replication of current findings using probability sampling to address issues of potential within‐country cultural variability also warrants further consideration.

The study establishes the validity and reliability of two of the most popular instruments in the empowerment literature in the Greek context. In addition, the paper highlights links between work‐related cultural values and perceived empowerment among Greek employees – a pertinent but inadequately researched issue in Greece.