The long reach of the leader: Can empowering leadership at work result in enriched home lives?

Work-home enrichment occurs when employees' work roles and experiences lead to benefits and resources that improve the quality of life in the home role. Guided by the self-determination theory (SDT), we developed a serial mediation model in which empowering leadership predicted work-home enrichment via satisfaction of innate psychological needs of SDT and then via work engagement. Four waves of data over a 9-month period were obtained from 289 full-time U.S. employees. Structural equation modeling and the PROCESS macro were used to verify the indirect effect of empowering leadership on work-to-home enrichment. Empowering leadership predicted subordinates' need satisfaction, which, in turn, predicted work engagement. Work engagement was then associated with positive spillover from work to home roles in the form of work-home enrichment. Theoretically, empowering leadership is a condition of the work environment that can satisfy important psychological need requirements outlined in SDT and promote work engagement, thereby influencing employees' home functioning. Integrating the frameworks of empowering leadership and SDT, this study provided valuable insights for general employee well-being by showing how empowering leadership could have a spillover effect in the form of work-home enrichment. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).