Principles of Organizational Behavior, 3rd Edition

14Empowerment's Pivotal Role in Enhancing Effective Self‐ and Shared Leadership

JAY A. CONGER¹ AND CRAIG L. PEARCE²

¹Kravis Leadership Institute Claremont McKenna College

²Pennsylvania State University

Empowerment is an essential building block of today's expressions of leadership. Its role has become particularly salient as our old notion of leadership as the responsibility of an individual at the top of an organization is being challenged. With the rise of knowledge workers, today's employees demand more than simply a good job and a paycheck. They expect to make more meaningful contributions through empowered self‐leadership and team‐based shared leadership (Pearce and Manz, 2005).

Empowerment and the latter forms of leadership are intertwined. For example, at the individual level of analysis, empowerment is experienced when followers engage in effective self‐leadership (Houghton, Neck, and Manz, 2003; Manz and Sims, 1980), where self‐leadership is defined as “a process through which people influence themselves to achieve the self‐direction and self‐motivation needed to perform” (Houghton et al., 2003, p. 126). The empirical evidence suggests that empowerment has a powerful positive influence on an individual's capacity to lead themselves (e.g. Liden, Wayne, and Sparrowe, 2000; Spreitzer, 1995; Spreitzer, Kizilos, and Nason 1994). Moving to the group level of analysis, empowerment is experienced when a group effectively practices shared leadership (Pearce and Conger, 2003 ...