- 1308 -
978-1-4799-0474-7/13/$31.00 ©2013 IEEE
Impact of Empowering Leadership Behavior on Communication
Satisfaction and Its Mechanism
ZHANG Li,XIA Ying,CHEN Long
School of Management, Harbin Institute of Technology, P.R.China,150001
Abstract: Staffs’ communication satisfaction has
been deeply recognized, leadership behavior impacts
organizational internal staffs’ communication satisfaction.
This study discusses how the empowering leadership
behavior impacts the communication satisfaction and its
mechanism of action. Four manufacturing enterprises in
Heilongjiang province were selected to fill in
questionnaires. After that, we used multivariate statistical
analysis methods for the empirical research. The results
show that: empowering leadership behavior has a
positive impact on communication satisfaction;
communication openness mediates the relationship
between empowering leadership and communication
satisfaction. Therefore, organization leaders can improve
staffs’ communication satisfaction by cultivating new
organization culture atmosphere that all people
participating actively. At the same time, project
decision-making groups should be set up. Managers can
also set incentive systems to promote employees’
responsibility.
Keywords: empowering leadership behavior,
communication satisfaction, communication openness,
decision making
1 Introduction
With the development of economic and information
globalization, external environment the enterprise faced
with is becoming more dynamic. The competition
between the enterprises is becoming more and more
fierce. Information sharing in or between the enterprises
is particularly essential. No successful enterprises can be
separated from the interpersonal trust and open
communication. Effective communication is important
for the healthy development of the individuals and
organizations
[1]
. Thus, improving the employees’
communication satisfaction is a factor that used to
guarantee the organization’s rapid development
[2]
. Staffs
particularly think highly of the communication with
leaders, contacts with bosses. In a word, the leadership
behavior will affect employees’ communication
Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of
China (71102130), the Humanities and Social Sciences project,
State Education Ministry (09YJC630050) and the Fundamental
Research Funds for the Central Universities (HIT. HSS.201111)
satisfaction
[3]
. Among the four kinds of typical leadership
behavior (including direct, transaction, transformational
and empowering leadership), empowering leadership
behavior is characterized by sharing information with
employees, participating in decision making
[4]
. It will
increase the chances of the communication between
employees or between leaders and employees, compared
to traditional leadership behavior. Also it will enhance
the trust from top to bottom
[5]
, as well as the organization
performance
[6]
, job satisfaction and organizational
commitment
[7]
. Leaders’ empowerment allow the
employees have more rights to speak, they will dare and
be apt to speak out their opinions, express their feelings.
Once considering these performance in communication
area, we call them communication openness. Previous
studies have showed that open-ended communication
will promote staffs’ personal responsibilities and improve
employees’ communication satisfaction
[8]
. Employees’
job satisfaction will be higher in an organization with
more open communication atmosphere
[9]
. This paper
studies the impact of empowering leadership behavior on
communication satisfaction and its reason of impact.
2 Literature review
2.1 Empowering leadership behavior
Empower Management means to transfer some
authority or power to those disadvantaged people in the
organization to a certain degree
[10]
. More researchers
have focused on the leaders’ roles played in the process
of empowering. For example, Conger and Kanungo once
defined empowering leadership behavior as the direct
supervisor or upper leaders transfer some authority or
power to subordinates. It allows subordinates have the
right to participate in making decisions or make
decisions in certain powers range and shoulder the
corresponding responsibilities
[11]
. They set up a five-
stage model of the empowerment process. Including
"confirm the factors that caused employees’ feeling no
right", "the use of empowering strategy and technology",
"enhanced subordinates’ feelings of self-efficacy",
"subordinates’ psychological state after being empowered
"and "subordinates’ behavior performance". Authorized
leadership behavior also pays attention to information
sharing, it was the leaders’ information sharing with
subordinates and employees through the step of sharing
2013 International Conference on Management Science & Engineering (20
th
)
July 17-19, 2013 Harbin, P.R.China