Empowered Leadership and Its Governance

This chapter addresses empowered leadership and its governance. The chapter starts by looking at empowered leadership and its impact on organizational performance and then discusses the factors that positively and negatively influence the role identity of empowered leaders. Subsequently, the authors turn the perspective toward governance and governmentality, and how these concepts differ from leadership and management. After a short introduction to governance types, the authors discuss how governance and governmentality apply to the governance of projects and empowered leaders. The chapter finishes with an empirically derived model for the governance of empowered leaders which outlines how the project manager’s perception about the empowered leader’s professionality, situational “fit,” and benevolence influence the decision to either govern predominantly through trust or through control.