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We examined the mediating role of empowerment in the associations among centralization, formalization, and employee innovative behavior in organizations. Respondents were 750 highly skilled full-time employees of manufacturing organizations in the Republic of Korea who completed a self-administered survey. Structural equation modeling was used to evaluate the hypotheses of our study. The findings demonstrated that centralization and formalization were negatively related with empowerment. Empowerment was positively associated with employee innovative behavior, and played a mediating role among centralization, formalization, and innovative behavior. We recommend that managers of organizations establish self-managed teams that are able to make decisions autonomously, and that managers use a less formalized organizational structure to enhance employee empowerment.
Rhee et al. (2017) studied this question.