Abstract
Using theories of empowering leadership, empowerment and social exchange, this paper aims to add to the literature on leadership in higher education by exploring how and why empowering leadership is linked to academics’ work engagement through mediation of work characteristics that are crucial to academics: job autonomy, social community at work, recognition, and unreasonable tasks. To investigate this, data from a cross-sectional survey of N = 3759 (n = 3059) academics and doctoral research fellows from three major Norwegian universities were analyzed using structural equation modeling. The results show that empowering leadership is related to academics’ work engagement through the following work characteristics: job autonomy, social community at work, and unreasonable tasks. Empowering leadership was also related to academics’ recognition, but recognition was not, in turn, associated with work engagement. Future researchers may consider prospective, experimental, and qualitative designs to extend the results of this study.