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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the mediating role of psychological empowerment in the relationship between ethical leadership and employee work engagement as well as the moderating effect of power distance orientation. Design/methodology/approach With a multi-wave survey, this paper uses a sample of 251 employees from the banking sector in Pakistan to test the hypotheses. Findings The results reveal that psychological empowerment partially mediates the relationship between ethical leadership and employee work engagement. Besides, power distance orientation mitigates the positive relationship between ethical leadership and psychological empowerment as well as the indirect effect of ethical leadership on employee work engagement via psychological empowerment. Originality/value This study contributes to the existing ethical leadership literature by identifying psychological empowerment as an additional mediator and power distance orientation as a boundary condition, in the relationship between ethical leadership and employee work engagement.
Ahmad et al. (Mon,) studied this question.