Too much of a good thing: how to buffer the unintended adverse effects of empowering leadership?

While empowering leadership has been widely recognized for positive organizational outcomes, its potential drawbacks on performance remain underexplored. This research investigates the potential negative effects of empowering leadership while using the job demand-control-support model. Our study, based on data from 235 pairs, reveals that the relationship between empowering leadership and job demands follows a U-shaped pattern. Initially, empowering leadership reduces job demands, enhancing employee role performance. Nevertheless, as a leader’s empowerment increases, individuals perceive higher demands, resulting in decreased role performance. Therefore, the association between leaders’ empowerment and employees’ role performance via job demands follows an inverted U-shape, where moderated empowerment improves role performance, but excessive empowerment has a detrimental effect. Furthermore, the strength of this relationship was moderated by task complexity and leader support in distinct ways. Finally, the study provides novel theoretical and practical implications for empowering leadership literature.