When Does Procedural Fairness Promote Organizational Citizenship Behavior?: Integrating Empowering Leadership Types in Relational Justice Models.

We examined how procedural fairness interacts with empowering leadership to promote employee OCB. We focused on two core empowering leadership types¿encouraging self-development and encouraging independent action. An experiment revealed that leaders encouraging self-development made employees desire status information more (i.e., information regarding one¿s value to the organization). Conversely, leaders encouraging independent action decreased employees¿ desire for this type of information. Subsequently, a multisource field study (with a US and German sample) showed that encouraging self-development strengthened the relationship between procedural fairness and employee OCB, and this relationship was mediated by employees¿ self-perceived status. Conversely, encouraging independent action weakened the procedural fairness-OCB relationship, as mediated by self-perceived status. This research integrates empowering leadership styles into relational fairness theories, highlighting that multiple leader behaviors should be examined in concert and that empowering leadership can have unintended consequences.