Empowering leadership and its role on job satisfaction and employee creativity: An empirical study of Saudi Arabian banks

Saudi Arabian work culture and societal cultures are predominantly viewed as authoritarian, self-directed and has restricted autonomy. In such cultural preferences, measuring the association and significance of empowering leadership for the purpose of achieving job satisfaction of employees and enhancing their creativity is relative to add in to knowledge which however has not been taken care of earlier. We are obviously interested in finding out the significance of such relations to see whether these relations have the same existence and impact as these exist in western work cultures. The research was conducted in the banking sector of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and research sample included decision makers and work performers. A total of 68 executives and 250 employees were contacted to participate willingly in this research. From this, 57 executives and 215 employees returned our questionnaires which constituted 83.8 and 86% response rate, respectively. We have used a variety of statistical methods (SPSS, Amos) to test the validity of the model elements, their mutual relationship as validated in a number of earlier researched and to determine the quality of the model fitness. Our results are significant and indicate a strong impact of empowering leadership in achieving work performance satisfaction in employees, irrespective of the work cultural preferences and it also help to enhance employee creativity. Whereas, self-leadership as a motivational construct if present in employees may augment the impact of empowering leadership employee feelings of being empowered.