The Role of Goal Specificity in the Relationship Between Leadership and Empowerment

Although there has been much recent attention to empowerment in public sector research, most of this research focuses on structural empowerment, rather than psychological empowerment, and thus focuses on management practices, rather than on employees’ motivational states. This article examines the processes through which transformational leadership and transactional leadership affect employees’ feelings of psychological empowerment, focusing specifically on the role of goal specificity as a mediating variable. Using data collected from state government employees, the structural equation modeling (SEM) analyses found support for hypotheses that goal specificity mediates the relationships between both transformational and transactional leadership and psychological empowerment. These results contribute to the discussion of transformational and transactional leadership approaches with regard to goal setting in the public sector and provide practical implications that public managers’ leadership behaviors can help employees develop positive attitudes toward goal specificity, which can then lead to feelings of psychological empowerment.