Empirical research tells us when empowering leadership has benefits. And it is not always the answer. Contrary to fashionable thinking.
The 2013 Academy of Management Journal article by Lorinkova, Pearsall and Sims reports on performance data from 60 teams working on complex tasks.
Teams led by a directive leader initially outperformed those led by an empowering leader.
However, despite lower early performance, teams led by an empowering leader experienced higher performance improvement over time. The longer-term performance uplift is due to higher levels of team learning, better self-coordination, and better development of the mental models for the work in hand.
The argument that the formula for success is more complex than simply empowering your teams is echoed in multiple fields. When Di Schiena, Letens, Van Aken and Farris wrote in Administrative Sciences in 2013 about teams in the military, they point out that transformational leadership techniques must be balanced with a transactional approach.
Of course, this resonates with the ‘Situational leadership’ theories, which advise managers to apply different leadership styles to individual workers based on their personal competence, maturity, or readiness.
So, the evidence is: a directive, transactional style has its place; don’t assume that empowering your team is best if you want short-term results. But for your people to perform better over the long run, the data shows you must allow them to learn their own lessons, work out their own way of collaborating, and define their own language.