Transformational Leadership and Psychological Empowerment Among Employees

Abstract

There is an increasing amount of research showing that how leaders act affects how employees feel psychologically at the workplace. Most of this research has been done in the West. Therefore, it is important to do research in non-Western cultures, especially in emerging economies and sectors and particularly when doing comparisons by industry. The research adopted the cross-sectional research design and obtained data from N=101 full-time employees working for private and governmental organizations within the region of Delhi NCR in India. In order to determine the levels of transformational leadership and psychological empowerment, standardized tests such as MLQ-5X and Psychological Empowerment Scale, respectively, were adopted. Analysis of data was conducted using the methods of descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, t-tests, and multiple regressions. The analysis of the data revealed significant positive relationships between transformational leadership and psychological empowerment. Based on the results of the regression analyses, transformational leadership was a predictor of psychological empowerment. There was no observed difference in psychological empowerment between sectors, but the private sector reported significantly greater levels of transformational leadership than the public sector. This research shows that transformational leadership is one of the main drivers concerning employee empowerment, as well as its potential to generalize to additional contexts through its ability to predict motivation and employees' engagement at other companies with similar types of leaders.