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A paradox perspective on the interactive effects of visionary and empowering leadership
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

A paradox perspective on the interactive effects of visionary and empowering leadership

Eric Kearney, Meir Shemla, Daan van Knippenberg and Florian A. Scholz
Organizational behavior and human decision processes, v 155, pp 20-30
Nov 2019
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2019.01.001
url
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2019.01.001View
Published, Version of Record (VoR)Open Access (License Unspecified),  Open

Abstract

Empowering leadership Goal clarity Paradox Performance Visionary leadership
•We examine the interaction between visionary and empowering leadership.•We integrate two thus far separate streams within the leadership literature.•By combining visionary and empowering leadership, leaders can address a key paradox.•We identify goal clarity as a specific mediating mechanism. In a multi-source, lagged design field study of 197 leader-follower dyads, we test a model that predicts positive interactive effects of visionary and empowering leadership on follower performance. Based on the paradox perspective, we argue that visionary and empowering leadership are synergistic in that their combination enables leaders to address a key paradox inherent to leader behavior identified by Waldman and Bowen (2016): Maintaining control while simultaneously letting go of control. We argue that visionary leadership addresses the former and empowering leadership addresses the latter pole of this pair of opposites. Hence, in line with paradox thinking, we posit that leaders will engender more positive effects on follower performance when they enact visionary and empowering leadership behaviors simultaneously and adopt a “both-and” approach, rather than focus on one of these behaviors without the other. Our results support our hypothesized interactive effect of visionary and empowering leadership on goal clarity, as well as a conditional indirect effect such that goal clarity mediates the interactive effect of visionary and empowering leadership on individual follower performance.

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98 citations in Web of Science
104 citations in Scopus

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Collaboration types
Domestic collaboration
International collaboration
Web of Science research areas
Management
Psychology, Applied
Psychology, Social
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