Gender moderating role in the relationship between leader humility and employee psychological empowerment

Abstract

The gender difference in leadership and subordinates’ empowerment has been a controversial topic studied in several countries. This study examines how gender moderates the relationship between the perceived leader humility and the subordinate psychological empowerment in a country that scores high in the power distance index. Four dyads were studied considering leader gender, male or female, and subordinate gender: M-M, F-M, M-F, F-F. Four hypotheses were tested with a questionnaire applied to 253 MBA students in Ecuador. Multi-group analysis was used with the bootstrapping technique. It was found that gender had a significant moderating effect in three of the studied relationships, being the M-M and F-M dyads the ones that presented the highest correlations. The results showed that male subordinates value humility attributes in their leaders, whether male or female, while the relationship was not significant for the F-F dyad.