Empowering Leadership and Followers' Individual Performance. The Mediating Effect of Proactive Behavior and the Moderating Role of Task Completion Deadlines

Seminar paper from the year 2018 in the subject Business economics - Organization, grade: 1,0, University of Potsdam (Führung, Organisation und Personal), language: English, abstract: This research report introduces task completion deadlines as a novel influence on empowering leadership and its outcomes. Based on the cost of autonomy theory and temporal construal theory, the author develops a theoretical model that explains short- and long-term deadlines as moderators of the relationship between empowering leadership and followers’ proactive behavior. She proposes short-term deadlines to reverse, and long-term deadlines to strengthen the actually positive effect of empowering leadership on followers’ proactive behavior. Based on prior literature, these assumptions can only be partly confirmed since relating studies are mainly on the team-level. Practical implications as well as future directions for research are provided.