The Association of Transformational Leadership with Employee Empowerment: A Study among IT Professionals

Abstract

Organizations in the 21st century are in the process of identifying different ways and means to develop and maintain leadership in the domain they work. By influencing the attitude and behavior of employees, as well as motivating them to contribute more, leaders can play a pivotal role in the achievement of organizational goals. Empowerment of employees gives them an extent of autonomy as well as decision making capacity to the employees at lower level. Inadequate empowerment of employees may lead various consequences like turnover of employees, lack of productivity among employees, decreased contribution; absence of updating knowledge as well as techniques, lack of development and growth, excessive wastage and creation of non-qualitative products and services. Organizational decision makers are more or less myopic about this. Moreover, not much attention has been paid to identify whether and how leadership influences employee empowerment. This study will help the organizational executives to know the role of transformational leadership style on employee empowerment. Descriptive research was carried out adopting a 7-point scale structured questionnaire to collect primary data. Regression analysis was used, and it is found that transformational leadership is positively associated with employee’s feeling of control; in other words, managerial empowerment.