Working Paper: Do Empowered Employees Cope Better With Change? Empowering Leadership and Work Identity in Times of Crisis

The role of empowering leadership in the process of managing change during times of large-scale systemic stress is ambiguous and insufficiently investigated. We develop an intraindividual change model of coping through empowerment that proposes that increasing empowering leadership is necessary to strengthen employees’ individual psychological capital over time in order to manage organizational change during crisis. By distinguishing between individual strategies for retaining existing resources and acquiring new ones when exposed to systemic stress, we further develop and test a moderated mediation model that empowering leadership increases coping with change though psychological capital only when work identity as a resource is weak. A strong work identity serves as a source of empowerment, thus providing a competing strategy for resource conservation and a limitation to the impact of empowering leadership on psychological capital. We base our study on longitudinal survey data from nursing staff during the peak wave of the COVID-19 pandemic and integrate the theory of resource conservation and work identity to make these claims. Our findings bring novel insights to our understanding of empowering leadership and the management of employees during high-impact systemic crises.