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The aims of this paper are to clarify empowerment as a construct, assess whether environmental and psychological empowerment differentially predicts job outcomes, and investigate the effects of transformation and transactional leadership on empowerment.

University students (n=197) rated leadership and empowerment in their workplaces and a number of job outcomes using an on‐line questionnaire.

Results supported the proposition that empowerment should be separated into its behavioral and psychological components. The dimensions of empowerment also differentially predicted job outcomes. In particular, environmental empowerment was better at predicting outcomes than was psychological empowerment. It was also found that transformational and transactional leadership predicted environmental empowerment more strongly than psychological empowerment.

Limitations include that the study was cross‐sectional, used a student sample, and a single common method for collecting the data. The primary implication for research is that empowerment should be separated into two constructs, environmental and psychological.

Practical implications include that environmental empowerment has more predictive power than does psychological empowerment on workplace outcomes and that leadership has a stronger impact on environmental than psychological empowerment.

This study is the first to call into question the way empowerment has been measured in prior studies and provides useful directions with which to pursue future research in this area.

The purpose of this article is to consider how project leadership knowledge and behaviour influence project team trust and social capital development and use in the context of a global HR information systems project.

A comparative interpretive case study approach was used, including interviews (n=45) and participant observation with members at all levels of the two examined projects. Interpretive patterns from situated activities enabled inferences to be drawn about different types of project leader (PL) knowledge and behaviours and trust and the bridging and bonding aspects of social capital.

PLs need to apply knowledge in three areas in order for trust to develop within the project team (external leadership, internal leadership and hybrid leadership), which in turn is a necessary pre‐condition for the development and exploitation of social capital, a significant influence on project success.

The choice of two extreme cases (one where trust did not develop and one where trust did) means that further research is needed to corroborate the findings in order to make generalisations.

The study highlights ways in which a PL can foster the development of trust in the context of complex cross‐cultural, cross‐functional IS project teams. The study identifies how there are different types of trust that need to be generated and how this depends on good internal, external and hybrid PL leadership.

The study highlights the importance of different types of trust for being able to exploit social capital at the project level that has not been studied explicitly in the literature.