Empowering employees through communicative leadership

Resumo

In 21st century organizations, the need for empowering approaches to leadership, such as coach and facilitator of dialogue has been advocated and the traditional command-and-control management challenged. A concept characterized by dialogue and inclusive and responsive forms of communication as well as involvement in decision-making is “communicative leadership”, used since a decade in Swedish private and public organizations. This study analysed how leaders perceive the contribution of communicative leadership to employee empowerment in a multinational business organization. Findings illustrate that leaders’ communication strategies in relation to employee participation, engagement and empowerment diverge in important ways. A communicative leadership strategy including an informal bottom-up approach involving dialogue and responsive communication behaviours invited employees to make their voices heard and participate in decision-making, and thus contributed to a higher level of employee empowerment. The findings of this study contribute to extend and modulate previous research on the outcomes of leaders’ communication, particularly transformational leadership communication behaviours. A communicationbased conceptualization of employee empowerment is contributed, including employees’ abilities to voice concerns, influence work in dialogue and take individual action.