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Introduction
Empowerment has long been assumed to play a crucial role in group development and organizational effectiveness by both management researchers and practitioners (Bennis and Nanus, 1985; Neilsen, 1986). Extant research has found that psychological empowerment has significant effects on employees’ work-related outcomes, such as organizational commitment and job satisfaction (e.g. Aryee and Chen, 2006; Spreitzer et al., 1997), task performance (e.g. Hempel et al., 2012; Wagner, 1994), contextual performance or OCB (e.g. Chiang and Hsieh, 2012; Wat and Shaffer, 2005) and innovation performance (e.g. Singh and Sarkar, 2012; Sun et al., 2012). However, there are many unanswered questions regarding how individual differences impact the psychological empowerment-work performance relation and the psychological mechanisms linking psychological empowerment to employees’ performances.
Scholars have long been interested in the extent to which the positive effects of empowerment can be generalized across situations, such as types of industries (e.g. Batt, 2002), occupations (e.g. Kraimer et al., 1999) and cultures (e.g. Seibert et al., 2004). However, few theories concerning the moderating effects of personal propensities have been developed (Seibert et al., 2011). Since matching individual needs and abilities with work expectations leads to improved performance, the effects of psychological empowerment on performance depend on employees’ self-control abilities. Locus of control, an important individual difference, represents the generalized expectancy concerning the determinants of one’s life (Rotter, 1966; Thomas and Velthouse, 1990). Internal individuals may prefer, and perform better under conditions of self-control than externals (Gregory, 1978; Rotter, 1966). Hence, the impact of psychological empowerment on performance might be contingent upon employees’ locus of control.
Second, although intrinsic work motivation, i.e. the extent to which an individual is interested in a task and engages in it for the sake of the work itself (Ambrose and Kulik, 1999), has been used to explain the cognitive process of psychological empowerment with employee performance and creativity (Amabile, 1996; Thomas and Velthouse, 1990), there has been little empirical evidence to support this mechanism (Zhang and Bartol, 2010). Therefore, in their meta-analysis, Seibert et al. (2011) suggested that psychological empowerment theory should be integrated with theories of motivation.
Third, R&D employees play a significant role in organizational innovation and development. Given uncertain and creative tasks and their high-level skills and education,...