The double-edged sword of empowering leadership: Investigating why and when empowering leadership prevents versus promotes employee time theft while working from home

Employee time theft is a prevalent negative work behavior in telework contexts. Empowering employees to work independently can be an effective strategy for managers to prevent employee time theft while working from home (TTWH). However, a growing body of research has questioned whether, in all cases, empowering leadership is beneficial. Thus, the primary goal of this research is to provide greater insight into both why empowering leadership may be an effective leadership style to prevent employee TTWH and when empowering leadership may not be effective but instead promote employee TTWH. Applying a social exchange perspective, I develop a theoretical model that incorporates a beneficial mediating effect and a detrimental moderating effect between empowering leadership and employee TTWH. On the one hand, telework employees who experience leader-bestowed benefits (i.e., empowerment) are more satisfied in their job and therefore respond positively to empowering leadership by engaging in less TTWH (beneficial mediating effect). On the other hand, if telework employees experience high levels of job ambiguity, they are likely to perceive their leader as passive and unhelpful and therefore respond negatively to empowering leadership by engaging in more TTWH (detrimental moderating effect). I found support for these predictions in both a time-lagged field study (Study 1) and a scenario-based experiment (Study 2). Taken together, these findings reveal the double-edged nature of empowering leadership by demonstrating that it has the potential to prevent and promote employee negative work behavior in telework contexts. Implications for future research and professional practice on empowering leadership are discussed.