Education and experience impact leadership development psychological empowerment

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to shed light on psychological empowerment in a leadership development context by addressing two questions. First, what is the role of leadership experience and education value in the psychological empowerment of leadership development? Second, are there significant differences in leadership development implications depending on the extent of psychological empowerment? Design/methodology/approach - These research questions are addressed in an empirical study of n = 256 individuals taking part in a leadership development course. The first question was analyzed with regression analysis and the second question was analyzed with analysis of variance and covariance after the individuals were categorized based on their psychological empowerment of leadership development. Findings - As hypothesized, leadership experience and leadership education value are significantly, positively related to the psychological empowerment of leadership development. Additionally, a higher psychological empowerment score did result in better leadership development implications. Conclusions for psychological empowerment and leadership development research are discussed. Originality/value - There is limited research on psychological empowerment and leadership development. This study contributes to the literature by immersing psychological empowerment in a leadership development context and empirically testing theory driven hypotheses based on transformational learning theory and expectancy value theory.