Empowering Leadership and Occupational Burnout: A Moderated Mediation Model of Employee Optimism, Employee Hardiness and Job Crafting

Abstract

Integration of social cognitive theory and hardiness theory, this study aimed to investigate the mediating mechanism of job crafting and the direct effect of empowering leadership that causes occupational burnout with the sample from law enforcement institutions. The authors also tested the moderating effect of employee optimism and employee hardiness between the linkage of job crafting and occupational burnout. To test the proposed hypothesis of this study, 192 participants from the law enforcement institution of Punjab, Pakistan participate in this study voluntarily. The findings of the study suggest that job crafting mediates the relationship between empowering leadership and occupational burnout. Furthermore, the authors found that employee optimism and hardiness moderate the relationship between empowering leadership and occupational burnout. The result of moderated mediation analysis revealed that the indirect effect of empowering leadership on occupational burnout was weakening when employee optimism and hardiness level was high. The findings of this study declared that empowering leadership has adverse consequences on employees’ physical and psychological health that decrease the well-being and employee optimism and hardiness reduce that stress level and enhance the intrinsic motivational level. Top management of law enforcement institutions must focus especially on the psychological health of employees and provide climate and psychological training that mitigates the harmful consequences of empowering leadership. Also, the authors through this study respond to the calls of prior researches as slight researches have studied the negative consequences of empowering leadership.