A Multilevel Quasi-Experimental Study of Leadership, Empowerment, and Performance in Teams.

Using a quasi-experimental design, we examined multilevel relationships among leadership, empowerment, and performance in a sample of 62 teams, 445 individual members, 62 team leaders, and 31 external managers from 31 stores of a Fortune 50 home improvement chain. We sampled two teams with different levels of interdependence in each store. Results indicated that, irrespective of team interdependence, different aspects of leadership predicted individual and team empowerment. Moreover, several team-level, cross-level, and individual-level relationships among both individual and team empowerment and performance were detected in high, but not in low, interdependent teams.