Antecedents and Consequences of Psychological and Team Empowerment in Organizations: A Meta-Analytic Review

This paper provides meta-analytic support for an integrated model specifying the antecedents and consequences of psychological and team empowerment. Results indicate that contextual antecedent constructs representing perceived high-performance managerial practices, socio-political support, leadership, and work characteristics are each strongly related to psychological empowerment. Positive self-evaluation traits are related to psychological empowerment and are as strongly related as the contextual factors. Psychological empowerment is in turn positively associated with a broad range of employee outcomes, including job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and task and contextual performance, and is negatively associated with employee strain and turnover intentions. Team empowerment is positively related to team performance. Further, the magnitude of parallel antecedent and outcome relationships at the individual and team levels is statistically indistinguishable, demonstrating the generalizability of empowerment theory across these 2 levels of analysis. A series of analyses also demonstrates the validity of psychological empowerment as a unitary second-order construct. Implications and future directions for empowerment research and theory are discussed.