# The Thin Line Between Empowering and Laissez-Faire Leadership  >[!External Links]- >- Author: [[Sut I Wong and Steffen Robert Giessner]] >- Full Title: The Thin Line Between Empowering and Laissez-Faire Leadership >- Category: #Source/articles >- [Article Link](x-devonthink-item://9047C4AA-93F5-41F3-B4AD-8DA338C19D73) ## Summary - Empowering leadership is essential in decentralised workplaces, but it can be mistaken for laissez-faire - Based on how this is applied in context, and on organisational culture and sense making. And when values between leader and follower are aligned. - Becomes laizzes faire when followers cannot meet the expectations of their leader, or where wellbeing of the follower is put under pressure, eg through workload. - "The greater the perception disagreement, the less effective the leaders are in relation to managing follower relationships, their performance, and work attitudes". ### Key Concepts - Implicit Leadership Theories. - Empowering leadership- involving employees in decision making, provide autonomy over tasks, express confidence in them, and remove bureaucratic constraints. ## Highlights - Previous research indicates that leaders giving such high degrees of discretion can be beneficial (Page 2) - but may not always result in such positive follower perceptions—as ==some studies showed employee uncertainty and resistance against discretion at work== (Page 2) - These findings suggest that followers’ perceptions of leaders might not always be positive, and they raise the question of whether ==empowering leadership might sometimes be perceived as laissez-faire leadership==, leading to a less-effective leadership perception. (Page 2) - leadership is seen as a matter of situation (Page 2) - implicit leadership theories (ILTs (Page 2) - followers have their own expectations of what leaders should or should not do in relation to their relational and task responsibilities (Tsui, 1984). These leadership schemas, derived from ILTs, are crucial parts of organizational sense making (Page 2) - Research on ILTs within dyadic leader-follower relationships has shown that followers evaluate their ==leaders as effective when the leaders’ behaviors are aligned with the followers’ expectations== (Epitropaki & Martin, 2005) (Page 2) - Empowering leadership is concerned with leader behaviors that decentralize power by involving employees in decision making (Carless, 2004). In addition, it requires leaders to provide followers with autonomy over their tasks, to express confidence in their performance, and to remove bureaucratic constraints (Ahearne et al., 2005) (Page 3) - emphasizes the development of follower self-management skills (Pearce & Sims, 2002) by prompting them to develop self-control and to act independently (Page 3) - Taking this relational empowerment view, empowering leadership in this study is seen as a set of leader behaviors that facilitate followers’ sense of control at work (Page 3) - on one hand, such a leadership approach may be perceived as facilitating empowerment, it can, on the other hand, be seen as avoiding responsibilities and/or not providing guidance—a perception fitting more of a laissez-faire leadership style. This raises questions about the conditions under which followers might perceive their leaders as laissez-faire (Page 4) - Too much authority and responsibility handed to the followers may be seen as inappropriate if, for example, the ==followers believe that they do not have the ability to fulfill these expectations or the followers’ workload increases== above a level that they can handle (Page 4) - growing body of research indicating potentially negative consequences of empowering leadership (Page 4) - van Dijke, De Cremer, Mayer, and van Quaquebeke (2012) showed that ==leaders who encourage independent follower action can weaken individuals’ needs for relatedness toward their organizations and, subsequently, reduce followers’ organizational citizenship behaviors (Page 4)== - some studies have shown that empowering leadership may ==generate resistance responses (Maynard et al., 2007) and task uncertainty (Cordery et al., 2010) and create poorer performance when monitoring is low== (Langfred, 2004) (Page 4) - All of these studies share the view that empowering leadership, which involves passing on influence to followers as part of the leadership process, may resonate better under specific conditions and/or for certain followers only (Bass & Steidlmeier, 1999). (Page 4) - The greater the perception disagreement, the less effective the leaders are in relation to managing follower relationships, their performance, and work attitudes (Fleenor et al., 2010). (Page 5) - The study demonstrated that followers experience high role ambiguity and low intrinsic motivation when they do not share similar empowerment expectations toward their leaders (Page 5) - We predict that when leaders’ self-perceptions of their empowering behaviors are higher than followers’ expectations, followers may attribute the given excessive autonomy and decision-making responsibilities to their leaders’ passivity, which is associated with laissez-faire leadership style (Page 6) - leaders’ self-ratings of their empowering behaviors are lower than what followers expected, followers may see their leaders as having no interest in recognizing or committing to developing their needs, which are also behavioral characteristics of laissezfaire leaders (Page 6) - Empowering leadership is recognized as crucial for leaders to cope with increasingly decentralized organizations (Page 19) - Middle management roles have been marginalized and, thus, more and more leaders need to rely on their followers to take up autonomous initiatives and decision-making responsibilities (Vecchio et al., 2010). (Page 20) - Note: True? Investigate - Specifically, followers saw over- and underfulfilling leader-empowering behaviors as more laissez-faire (Hypothesis 1) and evaluated this leadership as ineffective (Hypothesis 2) over time. These findings are intriguing, first, because traditional research on empowering and laissez-faire leadership has assumed that the two leadership styles are clearly distinct. (Page 20) - The current findings strongly support the usefulness of ILTs in organizational contexts to understand followers’ sensemaking processes of leadership behaviors, in particular, the conceptualization of the full-range leadership model. (Page 21) - On a practical side, this finding shows that leaders need to engage in active communication with their followers to (1) understand followers’ expectations and (2) consequently align them with the needs of the followers (Page 21) - Vecchio, R., Justin, J., & Pearce, C. 2010. Empowering leadership: An examination of mediating mechanisms within a hierarchical structure. The Leadership Quarterly, 21: 530-542 (Page 27) ## APA reference Wong, S. I. & Giessner, S. R. (2018). The thin line between empowering and laissez-faire leadership: An expectancy match perspective. Journal of Management, 44(2), 757–783. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206315574597