Linking structural empowerment and distributive justice to employee's behavioral and attitudinal consequences: Testing the mediating role of psychological empowerment

• Published date: 01 May 2022
• Author: Arun Aggarwal,Kamrunnisha Nobi,Sanjay Rastogi
• Date: 01 May 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/pa.2418

ACADEMIC PAPER

Linking structural empowerment and distributive justice to

employee's behavioral and attitudinal consequences: Testing

the mediating role of psychological empowerment

Arun Aggarwal

1

| Kamrunnisha Nobi

2

| Sanjay Rastogi

3

1

Chitkara Business School, Chitkara University,

Punjab, India

2

Department of Commerce, Panjab University,

Chandigarh, India

3

Department of Quantitative Techniques,

Indian Institute of Foreign Trade, New Delhi,

India

Correspondence

Sanjay Rastogi, Department of Quantitative

Techniques, Indian Institute of Foreign Trade,

New Delhi, India.

Email: srastogi@iift.edu;sanjayrastogi12@

gmail.com

Psychological empowerment plays a vital role in affecting the individual and

organizational consequences. However, there is scant research on the antecedents

and consequences of psychological empowerment despite being an essential variable

in organizational studies. This study aims to fill this gap by examining the impact of

structural empowerment and distributive justice on employee's commitment and citi-

zenship behavior through psychological empowerment. A cross-section research

designed was used to collect the data from 389 nurses employed in public and pri-

vate hospitals operating in Punjab, India. Out of these, 224 respondents were work-

ing in public hospitals, while 165 were of private hospitals. To test the proposed

hypothesized relationships, Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was applied. The

findings of the study depicted that structural empowerment significantly impacts the

affective commitment and organizational citizenship behavior through psychological

empowerment. Findings of the multi-group moderation analysis depicted that the

majority of the hypothesized relationships showed no significant results. The results

of the study proposed that rather than changing the individual characteristics, a

leader should improve the structure of the organization and should provide access to

structural empowerment, which ultimately leads to positive behavioral and attitudinal

organizational consequences. This study examines the effect of structural empower-

ment and distributive justice on OCB and affective commitment, which is being medi-

ated through the psychological empowerment of nursing professionals in healthcare

settings of India.

1|INTRODUCTION

During the past three decades, the notion of empowerment in the

workplace has been embraced by various organizational researchers

(Singh and Singh, 2019; Mostafa, 2017) and business practitioners

(Byham, 1988; Ford & Fottler, 1995; Kizilos, 1990). However, at the

same time, some researchers dismissed the concept of empowerment

by coining it as “passing fad”or “buzz word”(Abrahamson, 1996;

Strawn, 1994). Despite this, there is a substantial increment in the

interest of researchers and academicians for empowerment (Afsar &

Badir, 2016; Gholifar & Gholami, 2014; Jha, 2018; Safari et al., 2020;

Seibert, Wang, & Courtright, 2011). The reason for this is the ability

of empowerment to positively affect the organizational and individual

outcomes (Ayala Calvo & García, 2018; Singh & Sarkar, 2019). The

management practitioners proposed that empowerment leads to

high employee involvement within the organization, which further

affects the organizational productivity and higher level of job

satisfaction (Choi, Goh, Adam, & Tan, 2016; Hechanova, Alampay, &

Franco, 2006; Wong & Laschinger, 2013). Apart from this, the initial

theoretical developers of the psychological empowerment theory

(Conger & Kanungo, 1988; Thomas & Velthouse, 1990), and construct

validation of multi-dimensionality of psychological empowerment

scale (Spreitzer, 1995a) as well as empirical evidence suggested the

positive relationship between empowerment and organizational

Received: 25 May 2020 Revised: 29 July 2020 Accepted: 19 August 2020

DOI: 10.1002/pa.2418

J Public Affairs. 2022;22:e2418. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/pa © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 1of17

https://doi.org/10.1002/pa.2418

outcomes (Gregory, Albritton, & Osmonbekov, 2010; Joo & Jo, 2017;

Laschinger, Finegan, & Shamian, 2001b,2001c; Ugwu, Onyishi, &

Rodríguez-Sánchez, 2014). All this pinpoints the significance of

empowerment in organizational settings.

Over the period, different researchers have distinguished empow-

erment into two major categories (Amor, Vázquez, & Faíña, 2020;

Mufti, Xiaobao, Shah, Sarwar, & Zhenqing, 2020), psychological

empowerment (motivational approach), and socio-structural empow-

erment (relational approach). The roots of socio-structural empower-

ment are found in the Kanter's (1977) theory. The most vital feature

of this perspective is power-sharing (Conger & Kanungo, 1988) among

subordinate and supervisor and decentralization of power (Bennis &

Nanus, 1985; Kanter, 1983,1977) to cascade pertinent decision mak-

ing power to subordinates (Carless, 2004; Liden and Arad, 1996). This

perspective implant the ideas and values of democracy, that is, all indi-

viduals have equal power within the system (Prasad, 2001; Prasad &

Eylon, 2001). According to Spreitzer (2008), lower-level employees

within the organization can be empowered by providing access to

resources, support, information, and opportunity. On the other hand,

the constellation of experienced cognitions or psychological states is

associated with a motivational approach of empowerment

(Spreitzer, 1995a; Thomas & Velthouse, 1990). This approach focuses

on the perceptions of the employees regarding their sense of control

at the workplace (Spreitzer, 2008), their power to deal with people,

situations, and events that they confront at the workplace (Stewart &

Manz, 1997). As compare to the socio-structural approach of empow-

erment, psychological empowerment gives less importance to the del-

egation of responsibility and power, rather it emphasized feedback,

encouragement, inspirational goal determination, and open communi-

cation to enhance the involvement and commitment among

employees (Conger & Kanungo, 1988; Eisenberger, Fasolo, & Davis-

LaMastro, 1990; Seibert et al., 2011; Thomas & Velthouse, 1990). The

motivational or psychological perspective of empowerment was first

introduced with the conceptual work conducted by motivational theo-

rist Conger and Kanungo (1988). They contended that by empowering

organizational practices, the extent of employee motivation and initia-

tion depends on the amount of informational cues rendered by these

practices, which further amplifies the self-efficacy feeling

(Bandura, 1986) or expectancies of effort-performance of the

employees (Lawler, 1973). Thomas and Velthouse (1990) extended

the motivational approach of Conger and Kanungo (1988), proving a

more comprehensive theoretical framework of psychological empow-

erment (Seibert et al., 2011). Based on different theories of cognitive

motivation, they identified four types of psychological cognitions

associated with intrinsic task motivation. Those were impact, choice,

competence, and meaningfulness (Liden, Wayne, & Sparrowe, 2000;

Seibert et al., 2011; Spreitzer, 2008). Grounding on the conceptualiza-

tion of Thomas and Velthouse (1990), the first multidimensional scale

to measure the perceptions of psychological empowerment was

developed by Spreitzer (1995a). Spreitzer (1995a) operationalized and

extended this model and defined the psychological empowerment as

“increased intrinsic task motivation manifested in a set of four cogni-

tions reflecting an individual's orientation to his or her work role.”.

Spreitzer (1995a) replaced the dimension of choice with self-

determination and renamed the meaningfulness dimension with

meaning. In the present study, the researchers have used the labeled

specified by Spreitzer (1995a).

Meaning concerns that match between the necessities of an indi-

vidual's work role and individual's behaviors, standards, values, and

beliefs (Hackman & Oldham, 1980; Spreitzer, 1996,1995a). The

meaning dimension is similar to “job characteristic model”proposed

by Hackman and Oldham (1980), which recommends that when an

activity “counts”in one's value system then he/she feels a sense of

meaning. This results in a feeling of “caring about a given task”

(Thomas & Velthouse, 1990, p. 672).

The Impact is the degree of influence that individuals have on

operational activities, administrative, or strategic outcomes at the

workplace (Abramson, Seligman, & Teasdale, 1978; Ashforth, 1989;

Carless, 2004). That is, it manifests the notion of an individual's feeling

that his/her behavior makes a difference at the workplace or their

sense of control over organizational outcomes (Liden et al., 2000;

Thomas & Velthouse, 1990).

Self-determination is concerned with the individual's sense of

choice pertaining to initiating and regulating an individual's actions

(Carless, 2004; Deci, Connell, & Ryan, 1989). Self-determination is

similar to “locus of causality”given by Deci and Ryan (1985). It

manifested independence in decision-making procedures regarding

when and how work is undertaken (Carless, 2004).

The roots of Competence originates from the work of self-efficacy

proposed by Bandura (1977,1986,1989). It reflects the individual's

capabilities of performing an activity or task competently at the work-

place (Bandura, 1982; Carless, 2004; Gist & Mitchell, 1992). To date,

it is observed that a bulk of research on empowerment has been

mainly concerned with the individual job incumbent's psychological

experience of empowerment and associating this with varied

work-related outcomes like work performance, job satisfaction

(Carless, 2004). Nevertheless, a model is considered incomplete if it is

only capturing the individual's subjective reactions but does not study

the contextual factors simultaneously, which is responsible for shap-

ing those perceptions (Seibert, Silver, & Sashkin, 2001). Different

researchers at different points of time have pointed out the impor-

tance of contextual factors or the organizational environment in

studying empowerment (Lamm, Tosti-Kharas, & King, 2015;

Laschinger, Finegan, & Wilk, 2009; Laschinger, Nosko, Wilk, &

Finegan, 2014; Spreitzer, 1997,1996). Still, there are very few studies

which have captured the linkage between psychological empower-

ment and structural empowerment (Ahadi & Suandi, 2014; Meng

et al., 2015; Singh & Sarkar, 2019; Wagner et al., 2010). It has been

observed that positive changes in workplace structure can lead to

high employee commitment, work engagement, reduce stress and

healthier employees which ultimately results in improved patient care

and better organizational outcomes (Aggarwal, Chand, Jhamb, &

Mittal, 2020; Aggarwal, Dhaliwal, & Nobi, 2018; Laschinger, 2008).

Therefore, it is essential to understand the contextual factors that

facilitate empowerment in the work setting, especially in this era of

the pandemic of Covid-19. From a practical point of view, it can

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