2 LINKING LEADERSHIP EMPOWERMENT BEHAVIOR TO EMPLOYEE ATTITUDES AND BEHAVIORAL INTENTIONS: TESTING THE MEDIATING ROLE OF PSYCHOLOGICAL EMPOWERMENT

3 To improve their overall flexibility and efficiency, many organisations have replaced traditional hierarchical management structures with empowered (semi-autonomous or self-managing) work teams. Managers, once charged with directing and controlling work, are now asked to take on a new set of roles and responsibilities in order to lead these teams (Lawler, 1992). Arnold and colleagues (2000) identified five categories of empowering leadership behavior and constructed and validated a scale for measuring those behaviors. We build on their work by investigating how these behaviors relate to employee attitudes and behavioral intentions. We do so by developing a model in which psychological empowerment (Spreitzer, 1995, 1996; Thomas & Velthouse, 1990) mediates the relationship between empowering leadership behavior and employee job satisfaction and affective organizational commitment. We also modeled the relationship between these employee attitudes and intention to stay as a final outcome variable. Based on a sample of 381 service employees from four companies