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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent to which psychological empowerment and felt obligation can explain variations in personal initiative.

Employees from a Swedish organization participated in a web-based survey.

Psychological empowerment is important for enhancing proactive behavior at work, but its dimensions relate differently to personal initiative. Felt obligation mediates the relationship between psychological empowerment and personal initiative, but only for two dimensions of empowerment (meaningfulness and competence).

The paper contributes to our understanding of how employees’ feeling of obligation explains one form of proactive behavior. It also highlights the overlooked distinctiveness of psychological empowerment dimensions in predicting personal initiative at work.

While uncertainty during emergency response operations necessitates adaptive performance, emergency response organizations, such as the fire service, tend to constrain adaptive behaviors due to their highly formalized bureaucratic structures. Structural theories suggest that leaders can empower employees to bypass these constraints.

Using survey data from four US fire departments, this research tests whether mid-level supervisors can empower firefighters by increasing their ability to improvise during complex emergency response operations, and whether this enhances department adaptive performance. Moderated mediation is also performed to assess whether senior leaders must also be effective, empowering leaders in order to achieve heightened levels of empowerment and subsequent adaptive performance, as many senior leaders in the fire service are criticized for being overly bureaucratic, risk averse, and resistant to change.

The findings support compensatory effects and show how immediate supervisors are key to overcoming senior leader deficiencies and producing adaptive performance during conditions of high uncertainty and complexity.

The lack of response organizations’ success during complex incidents is often attributed to senior leaders who are risk averse, overly bureaucratic, and resistant to change (Wankhade and Patnaik, 2020). This study is the first to show how empowering leadership can help overcome these constraints to enhance adaptive performance under complex conditions in the fire service.

Implementing information and communication technologies (ICT) is often mentioned as a strategy that can foster public involvement and responsibility in health. The purpose of this paper is to provide a better understanding of the possibilities and issues afforded by the social uses of ICT for personal empowerment in health.

The paper discusses evidence from four case studies that characterize current computerization and networking processes in health. The studies shared a global framework comprising four interpretative paradigms of personal empowerment: the professional, technocratic, consumerist and democratic paradigms.

The results show the coexistence of four empowerment logics in ICT use. Two trends proved dominant: a strengthening of the control and standardization processes tied to the typical power relationships in health, and a reinforcement of personal autonomy and self‐assertion processes, either through commercial relationships or through the social relationships that are also present.

The paper supports the argument that in order to understand the opportunities for personal empowerment offered by ICT the logic underlying user practices in their respective contexts must be examined.

The paper uses data from four case studies to illustrate the contradictory logics shaping the personal empowerment process. Under these logics, an ICT user may play roles as patient, client, consumer, or citizen.

This paper aims to examine the relationship of perceived supervisor empowerment behaviors and feelings of personal empowerment with important work and well-being outcomes in a sample of Egyptian women managers and professionals.

Data were collected from 155 managerial and professional women using anonymously completed questionnaires. Respondents were relatively young; had university educations; had the short job and organizational tenures; held various levels of management jobs; and worked in a range of functions. All measures used here had been used and validated previously by other researchers.

Work outcomes included job satisfaction, career satisfaction, work engagement, work-family and family-work conflict, emotional exhaustion/burnout, life satisfaction and intent to quit. Both perceived levels of supervisory/leader empowerment behaviors and self-reported feelings of empowerment had significant relationships with the majority of work and well-being outcomes.

Data were collected using self-report questionnaires with the small risk of response set and common method biases. Second, all data were collected at one point in time making it challenging to address issues of causality. Third, all respondents came from the two largest cities in Egypt, Cairo and Alexandria; thus, the extent to which our findings would generalize to managerial and professional women and men is indeterminate. Fourth, it was not possible to determine the representativeness of our sample as well.

Practical implications of these findings along with future research directions are offered. Practical applications include training supervisors on empowerment behaviors, and training all employees on the benefits of personal empowerment and efficacy and ways to increase them.

A number of ways to increase levels of empowerment of both front-line employees and managers have been identified. These include increasing employee participation in decision-making, delegating authority and control to these employees, creating more challenging work roles through job redesign, leaders sharing more information and leaders providing more coaching and mentoring to their staff. At the micro level, increasing levels of employee self-efficacy through training and more effective use of their work experiences will increase personal empowerment and improve work outcomes.

Relatively little research has been undertaken on women in management and human resource management in Egypt.

This study aims to examine the impact of social media (SM) on the creation of digital entrepreneurship by female (irrespective of age) and youth male (aged 18–29 years) entrepreneurs, investigate if SM empowers those entrepreneurs and compare the empowerment characteristics between female and youth male entrepreneurs before and after starting their businesses.

Self-assessment questionnaires were collected from a sample of 408 Egyptian female and youth male digital entrepreneurs from Greater Cairo, whose businesses had been operating for more than one year.

The research showed the following four results: Of the surveyed entrepreneurs, 95% asserted that without SM, they would not have started their businesses. Female and youth male entrepreneurs are empowered both on personal and relational levels, and women’s empowerment is more evident in the latter. Before digital entrepreneurship, youth males have significantly higher averages than female entrepreneurs in almost all empowerment characteristics, whereas after digital entrepreneurship, female entrepreneurs have significantly higher averages in making decisions related to investment, personal education and personal health, as well as those of other household members. Female entrepreneurs are relatively more empowered than youth males after digital entrepreneurship when each group is compared with its initial status.

This study’s originality stems from using a large sample of entrepreneurs, including youth males, not just females; employing a more structured, comprehensive measure of empowerment than found in the literature because it included the rarely used psychological dimension; considering more than one SM tool and comparing empowerment of females to that of youth males.

The world of work is shifting from traditional career paths, to relentless change, leaner structures, evolving roles and a need to find meaning through the work the author do. A new skill-set is required to survive and thrive in the new economy. The purpose of this paper is to explore how learning programs focused on personal and career empowerment can build these skills, increase engagement, enhance performance and impact culture positively.

The paper summarises these new skill-sets required and raises critical questions: how do we create an environment for self and career empowerment? How do we act as catalysts for cultural and social transformation? It then outlines an approach to discovering the answers based on experiences facilitating I am Talent workshops for personal and career empowerment. Key insights and suggestions for personal and career empowerment topics and tools are highlighted.

The paper goes on to share the post-intervention impact results of a case study organisation, on culture, engagement, learning and performance.

The paper covers some practical skill areas that can significantly improve work and life results, in a world that is dynamic, uncertain and continuously changing.

Millennials come with whole new set of expectations and preferences in the way they interact with work. In a South African context, this is compounded by our educational and skills crisis resulting in many work entrants not being sufficiently prepared for the new world of work.

The learning programme is based on a book, I am Talent, by the author of this paper and is a unique approach to building personal and career empowerment.

Scholarly studies have criticized transformational leadership (TFL) for its lack of conceptual clarity and inadequate operationalization. This study endeavors to do a detailed examination of the dimensions of the construct to address the lack of conceptual clarity. Further, with respect to concerns regarding operationalization, the study does an exploratory evaluation of reconceptualized TFL's relationship with psychological empowerment, a construct through which TFL mostly has its beneficial outcomes.

Respondents (n = 335) from an Indian information technology (IT) services organization report on their psychological empowerment and the transformational behaviors of their supervisors using temporally separated (15 days) online questionnaires.

As expected, the dimensions of transformational leadership are not equally salient in influencing psychological empowerment; however, they explain variance in all dimensions of psychological empowerment. Visioning relates to meaning and impact; inspirational communication relates to all dimensions of empowerment; personal recognition relates to impact and competence; finally, intellectual stimulation relates to self-determination. Contrary to expectations, however, data did not support the relationship of intellectual stimulation and supportive leadership on competence.

Data collected from a single organization limit the claims of generalizability, and the use of a cross-sectional design prevents claims of causality. Given the significant variation in relational properties of individual dimensions, scholars can use dimensions of TFL, and therefore theorizing with these is possible.

This paper provides additional support for the unpacking of TFL, by hypothesizing and demonstrating the dimensional relationships between TFL and psychological empowerment.

To present a generic empowerment ecology framework to guide the operation of Future Centers and to empower Future Center visitors to respond to the challenges facing them and develop and implement innovative solutions.

An in‐depth case study was conducted in Be'er Sheva PISGA Future Center in the educational sector in Israel. Visits to a further 20 Future Centers around the world and a literature review helped to generalize the key findings and develop and validate the framework further.

Although empowerment is not always explicitly discussed in Future Centers, it is an important underlying philosophy. The framework developed in this research helps to ensure empowerment issues are systematically addressed and contains four perspectives: operating principles; resources; supporters and processes. These combine to form the empowerment ecology.

The empowerment ecology framework has been developed from observation predominantly in one Future Center. It should now be more fully tested and validated in other Future Centers.

This paper provides a framework to help Future Center practitioners and other future oriented working environments stakeholders to explicitly address empowerment issues.

This paper provides a detailed description of the operation of a regionally focused Future Center in the educational sector. The paper presents a novel empowerment ecology framework for use in facilitated user‐centered collaborative working environments, such as Future Centers.

Previous studies have examined the empowerment of individual teachers, while neglecting the fact that such a phenomenon might grow within a team. Building on the crossover model and social exchange theory, the aim of this study is to explore whether team empowerment among school management teams (SMTs), is transmitted to the school level and affects schoolteachers' job satisfaction and thereby schoolteachers' organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). Furthermore, we explored whether those relationships are moderated by team-member exchange (TMX) relationships.

Data were collected from 86 principals, 357 SMT members and 683 schoolteachers from 86 schools.

Results confirmed the mediating role of schoolteachers' job satisfaction, showing a positive relationship between SMT empowerment and schoolteachers' job satisfaction, and between job satisfaction and OCB. The moderation of TMX and the overall moderated mediation hypotheses were not supported.

The nature of data collected in the current study precludes any inference concerning the direction of casual links among the study constructs. Therefore, longitudinal studies could be designed, aimed at confirming the direction of links among the variables.

The findings reinforce the impact of schoolteachers' job satisfaction on achieving OCBs. Hence, SMT members carry the responsibility to cultivate satisfied schoolteachers through schools' support mechanisms and guidance in order to achieve schoolteachers' OCB.

The study identifies SMT empowerment as a key factor that may indirectly encourage schoolteachers to invest in OCBs through positive attitudes of schoolteachers' job satisfaction.

Creating and maintaining sustainable businesses require an understanding of the role of leadership in enhancing personal outcomes of employees, and of the processes by which they can be enhanced. The purpose of this paper is to report a study on analyzing how transformational leadership is related to followers’ meaning in life and subjective wellbeing, with psychological empowerment being a mediating variable.

Data were collected from 285 managers (69 females and 215 males) of a large manufacturing organization in western India. They responded to questions about their superior's transformational leadership and their own empowerment, meaning in life and wellbeing.

Empowerment mediated the relationship between transformational leadership and follower's meaning in life and wellbeing.

Same‐source bias is a possible limitation of the study. Leader's self‐rating on transformational leadership could be taken, but it would not be as valid as the rating given by followers. Another limitation is the collection of all data at the same time.

The strong and positive relationship between empowerment and meaning in life sheds light on making followers see greater meaning in life. Attempts to enhance meaning in life should first focus on increasing self‐efficacy. If followers do not have faith in their own capability to do their job, it may not be possible for them to see meaning in life.

This study adds to the existing literature by clarifying the process by which transformational leaders enhance followers’ meaning in life and subjective wellbeing.