The impact of enabling leadership on employee well-being moderated by leader agreeableness

Abstract

Empowering leadership is a style of leadership that has been associated with employee well-being. Because of a possible compatibility between empowering leadership behaviors and the components of agreeableness, we hypothesized that the relationship between empowering leadership and employee well-being is moderated by the leader’s agreeableness. To examine the question, 206 employees answered a questionnaire in which measures of employee well-being, leader behaviors and leader personality were included. A hierarchical regression revealed that the interaction between empowering leadership and leader agreeableness significantly affected employee well-being. These results suggest that the trait agreeableness moderates the effects of empowering leadership on employee well-being.