The impact of participative leadership behavior on psychological empowerment and organizational commitment in Chinese state-owned enterprises: The moderating role of organizational tenure

We investigated whether participative leadership behavior can produce psychological empowerment, which in turn, leads to organizational commitment for employees of Chinese state-owned enterprises. Based on the data collected from 173 employees in two state-owned enterprises, we found that participative leadership behavior was associated with organizational commitment, but not with all four dimensions of psychological empowerment, namely, meaning, competence, self-determination, and impact. Our findings also showed that while participative leadership behavior tended to make short-tenure employees feel competent and thus, more committed to an organization, such leadership behavior did not have a significant impact on competence as well as organizational commitment for long-tenure employees. © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2006.