Crafting a Job among Chinese Employees: The Role of Empowering Leadership and the Links to Work-Related Outcomes

The present study aims to examine the process through which empowering leadership shapes employees’ work engagement and in-role performance by facilitating job-crafting behaviors, specifically seeking resources, seeking challenges, and reducing demands. Based on the extensive data from 733 Chinese employees across various organizations located predominantly in Chongqing and Xi’an, China, we carried out different types of statistical analysis such as confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation modeling (SEM) to examine the relationships among empowering leadership, specific job-crafting behaviors, work engagement and in-role performance, test our hypothesis and our conceptual model. The results from structural equation modeling (SEM) suggested that empowering leadership was positively related to employees’ work engagement and in-role performance; empowering leadership was positively related to employees’ job crafting (seeking resources, seeking challenges and reducing demands); seeking resources, seeking challenges and reducing demands were positively related to in-role performance, and seeking challenges and reducing demands were positively related to work engagement. In the relationship between empowering leadership and in-role performance, seeking resources serves as a mediating factor. Similarly, seeking challenges mediates the association between empowering leadership and both work engagement and in-role performance. Furthermore, reducing demands mediates the links between empowering leadership and both work engagement and in-role performance. The implications of these findings are subsequently discussed.