Abstract
Empowerment has received substantial attention, from researchers and managers equally (Dewettinck & van Ameijde, 2011). Empowerment can increase the efficiency of teams, which in turn improves performance outcomes like productivity, proactiveness, and service quality (Raub & Robert, 2010). It can also turn unfavourable attitudinal outcomes into favourable ones. For example, increasing job satisfaction and involvement and enhancing organisational commitment (Raub & Robert, 2010). One prominent researcher found that successful leaders empower their subordinates by allowing them to provide input into decisions, giving them a sense of the importance of their work, and providing them with choices when performing their jobs (Keskes, Sallan, Simo & Fernandez, 2018). Thus, there are various benefits of empowerment for both employees and organisations.Leaders should offer adequate empowerment to their employees and should adopt appropriate behaviours that reflect empowerment. Employee motivation has been studied extensively in various disciplines (Wigfield & Cambria, 2010; Pritchard & Ashwood, 2008; Wiseman & Hunt, 2013). According to Crabtree (2013), lack of employee motivation affects work engagement. For example, employees will not take a keen interest in work assignments, withdraw themselves from work, and spend most of their time in unproductive tasks. Motivated employees exert greater effort. This idea, that motivated employees go one step further than other employees and 2 exert more effort, is also supported by Dysvik and Kuvaas (2013). Still, employee efforts will only lead to positive outcomes if used to achieve organisational strategic goals or provide benefit in some other way to the organisation. Similarly, Niessen, Weseler and Kostova (2016) demonstrated that motivated employees are more determined than other employees. Determination also means exerting significant efforts consistently (Guiso, Sapienza & Zingales, 2016). Karau and Williams (2004) found that motivated employees keep working on problems until they find appropriate solutions. Thus, motivation is necessary for employees to enhance their work to further improve overall organisational results. Researchers have suggested that empowering leadership is a crucial factor in improving employee motivation and outcomes (Kim, Beehr & Prewett, 2018). However, research which attempts to understand how empowering leadership impacts positively on employee motivation and leads to positive outcomes is limited