Individual- and Collective-Focused Leadership: A Multi-Method Investigation of Empowering and Identity Leadership, Basic Psychological Need Satisfaction, and Work-Related Outcomes

Leaders need to consider employees both as distinct individuals and as integral members of a collective to effectively address their needs. Drawing on self-determination theory (SDT), this study examines how individual- and collective-focused leader behaviors address employees’ autonomy, relatedness, and competence need satisfaction, influencing their intentions and behaviors. We propose that individual-focused behaviors (empowering leadership) address employees’ need for autonomy, while collective-focused behaviors (identity leadership) address their need for relatedness. Moreover, we argue that combining empowering and identity leadership addresses employees’ competence need satisfaction. We pre-registered a scenario-based experiment ( N = 226) and a time-lagged field study ( N = 308) to test the following hypotheses: (1) empowering leadership predicts autonomy need satisfaction, reducing turnover intentions; (2) identity leadership predicts relatedness need satisfaction, increasing organizational citizenship behavior (OCB); and (3) empowering and identity leadership interact to predict competence need satisfaction, resulting in higher work effort. Results from both studies support the hypothesized effects, except for the interaction effects in the field study. Together, these findings underscore that it is important for leaders to integrate individual- and collective-focused behaviors to holistically address employees’ psychological needs and foster positive work-related outcomes.