The Roles of Leader Empowering Behaviour and Employee Proactivity in Daily Job Crafting: A Compensatory Model

The study investigates how daily fluctuations in leader self-rated empowering behaviour are related to employees’ daily level job crafting behaviour. From an interactionist perspective, the authors propose and test two competing theoretical models investigating how supervisors’ daily empowering behaviour and subordinates’ proactive personality jointly affect subordinates’ daily work engagement and daily job crafting. One hundred and six leader-follower dyads working in several companies completed a questionnaire and a diary booklet over five consecutive workdays. The results of multi-level analyses revealed a cross-level-moderated mediation model, of which the indirect effect of empowering behaviour on job crafting via work engagement was stronger for less proactive employees than for higher proactive employees. The findings reveal a compensatory relation between leader empowering behaviour and employee proactive personality, suggesting that empowering behaviour would be more effective for increasing the work engagement of less proactive workers. Future directions and human resource management implications are discussed.