With the increasing uncertainty and complexity of the external business environment, organizations hope that employees can take the initiative to change the work methods and procedures, and then realize the functional change of the organization. Recent studies also show that employees′ taking charge plays a significant role in promoting organizational innovation, organizational adaptability, personal career success, and employees′ job satisfaction. Therefore, this behavior called taking charge has gradually attracted the attention of organizational behavior scholars and enterprise managers. The existing research mainly explores the influencing factors of taking charge from the individual, leadership, and organizational aspects. However, the research on how empowering leadership affects employees′ taking charge is still limited. In view of this, based on self-determination theory, job characteristic model, and expectation theory, this study proposes that empowering leadership can enhance employees′ intrinsic motivation and then stimulate taking charge. Meanwhile, we assume that task significance can strengthen not only the positive relationship between empowering leadership and intrinsic motivation but also moderate the mediating effect intrinsic motivation between empowering leadership and taking charge positively.

In order to verify the above hypothesis, this study conducteda questionnaire survey on employees of 22 city branches affiliated with a modern service company. A total of 1330 people participated in the survey, of which 1152 questionnaires were returned, and 970 were valid, with an effective recovery rate of 72.93%. We then used SPSS software to conduct multicollinearity, reliability and validity test, correlation analysis, regression analysis, and bootstrap tests. The results of data analysis show that: (1) empowering leadership can promote employees′ taking charge; (2) intrinsic motivation plays a partial mediating role between empowering leadership and taking charge; (3) task importance can positively moderate the relationship between empowering leadership and intrinsic motivation, and the mediating role of intrinsic motivation between empowering leadership and taking charge. In other words, when the level of task importance is high, the influence of empowering leadership on employees′ intrinsic motivation and the mediating effect of intrinsic motivation will be stronger.

The findings of this study have some theoretical contributions. On the one hand, from the perspective of self-determination theory, this study found the mediating role of intrinsic motivation between empowering leadership and taking charge. On the other hand, we examine the moderating role of task importance in the above process from the perspective of job characteristics. In addition, there are some practical implications for managers. First of all, enterprises should not only establish a climate of empowerment but also encourage managers to moderately authorize employees, so as to stimulate their intrinsic motivation and motivate their taking charge behavior. Secondly, in terms to task′s arrangement, organizations should try to reduce the number of trivial and unimportant tasks and attach importance to authorization management in essential tasks. As for the future research prospects, we suggest expanding the coverage of the sample, so as to improve the generality of our research results. At the same time, to enhance the persuasiveness of the research conclusions, multi-wave and multi-source data should be collected in future research.

empowering leadership, taking charge behavior, intrinsic motivation, task importance