Why do bootlickers get empowered more than boat-rockers? The effects of voice and helping on empowering leadership through threat and goal congruence perceptions.

Abstract

As empowering leadership becomes increasingly needed in today's complex organizations, so does the need to understand what motivates leaders to give more (or less) empowering leadership to followers. We draw on threat rigidity theory to examine how followers' challenging and supportive voice differentially impact the extent to which leaders empower their followers. We argue that leaders perceive followers' challenging voice as more threatening and tend to empower them less, whereas leaders perceive followers' supportive voice as reflective of their goal congruence with followers, which motivates leaders to give them more empowering leadership. We further leverage threat rigidity theory to explain how leader-directed helping moderates the degree to which leaders respond to each type of voice in terms of threat and goal congruence perceptions and ultimately, with empowering leadership. We argue that leader-directed helping buffers challenging voice's positive effect on perceived threat and amplifies supportive voice's positive effect on leaders' perceptions of goal congruence with followers, which, subsequently, affects leaders' willingness to empower them. We mostly find support for these predictions in a time-lagged, multisource field study and a scenario-based experiment conducted across different countries and cultures. We discuss our theoretical contributions to the literature and practical implications for followers and leaders. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).