Empowering and Directive Leadership: The Cost of Changing Styles

Smita Mukherjee and Zubin R. Mulla

Business Perspectives and Research, 2022, vol. 10, issue 2, 251-266

Abstract: We examine the cost of leaders changing between empowering and directive leadership styles on team outcomes. In a laboratory experiment, we collected data from 240 participants in 80 teams. Confederates enacted different leadership styles and led teams of participants in performing a series of tasks. When leaders changed their style from directive to empowering, teams took time to respond in terms of higher satisfaction with leader and affective commitment. However, when leaders changed their style from empowering to directive, the deterioration of satisfaction with leader and reduction in affective commitment were immediate. Moreover, teams of leaders who had been consistently directive showed higher affective commitment as compared to teams of leaders who had a history of being empowering but later shifted to being directive. First time managers can get inputs on how they should enact their leadership style and be aware that switching between styles may impose long-term costs on the team’s affective commitment and satisfaction with the leader.

Keywords: Empowering leadership; directive leadership; impression formation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/22785337211008321 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:busper:v:10:y:2022:i:2:p:251-266

DOI: 10.1177/22785337211008321

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Business Perspectives and Research
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().