Abstract: Employee engagement is one of the latest topics in the field of OB and HRM. Increased employee engagement will result in higher customer satisfaction, lower turnover intentions, and better team performance. At the individual level, employees with higher levels of engagement can do their jobs better, be willing to make more organizational citizenship behaviors, be more proactive in learning, and reduce interpersonal deviations and organizational deviations. Outside the workplace, employees with higher levels of engagement have less work-family conflicts, better physical and mental health, and higher life satisfaction. Therefore, improving employee engagement is important for both the organization and the individual. In view of this, it is of great theoretical and practical significance to study the antecedents and their mechanisms of employee engagement.
It may be easily inferred from systematic review of related literature that leadership behaviors play crucial roles in predicting employee engagement. Domestic and foreign scholars have successively demonstrated thattransformational leadership, charismatic leadership, and authentic leadership are significantly correlated with employee engagement but ignored the influence of empowering leadership on it. In view of this，this paper firstly intends to discuss the impact of empowering leadership on employee engagement. Besides, empowering leadership encourages and supports employees to take proactive actions, make decisions and take responsibility, and give them a self-determination experience to meet their own need of autonomy. Specifically, empowering leaders give employees the opportunity to implement and control their work in the manner and method of their choice, and encourage employees to make important decisions independently. In addition, in the process of empowerment, the leadership reflects the respect and recognition of employees’ opinions and suggestions. This is also an important autonomy support in the work environment, which helps employees meet their own need of autonomy. 
According to the self-determination theory, human beings have three basic needs, namely,need for autonomy, competence and relatedness. When these three basic needs are met, it is easy to motivate the individual’s intrinsic motivation and thus have a more sustained focus and commitment to the work. The need for autonomy is the core part of the three basic needs. The core meaning is that the individual can act according to his own will, instead of being forced by external forces. When employees’ need for autonomy are met, they will have stronger intrinsic motivation, more active actions, and a higher level of workplace well-being. Therefore, employees who have satisfied their own need for autonomy will devote more time and energy to work harder and demonstrate higher levels of work engagement. Hence, this paper intends to discuss the mediating effects of autonomy need satisfaction in the relationship between empowering leadership and employee engagement.
Finally, we believe that the relationship betweenautonomy need satisfaction and employee engagement will be moderated by the employee’s learning goals orientation. Specifically, for employees with high learning goal orientation, regardless of the external environment and conditions, they are willing to invest in work tasks, in order to learn new knowledge, new skills, and constantly improve their work ability. Even if the working environment gives them a small amount of autonomy, they will be proactive. This means that for such employees, the degree of autonomy need satisfaction has little impact on employee engagement. In contrast, low-learning-oriented employees have a lower willingness to work, and they are more dependent on the influence of external factors and the satisfaction of their own needs. When the work environment gives them autonomy and meets their own autonomous need, they will show higher levels of engagement. When the autonomy support in the environment is relatively low, their engagement will be reduced accordingly. For such employees, the impact of autonomy need satisfaction on engagement will be strong. Hence，this paper aims to discuss how employees’ learning goal orientation moderates the relationship between autonomy need satisfaction and work engagement.
The respondents of this study come from a number of companies in Beijing, which are involved in manufacturing, real estate, construction, communications and other industries. In order to avoid the influence of common method bias, the study conducted data collection in two phases, two weeks before and after. In the first survey, employees filled out questionnaires including items of background information, empowering leadership, autonomy need satisfaction, and learning goal orientation. The content of the second survey was the employee’s engagement. In the first survey, we distributed questionnaires to 500 employees and received 322 valid questionnaires. In the second survey, questionnaires were also sent to the 500 employees, and 299 valid questionnaires were returned. Matching the two valid questionnaires recovered, a total of 253 employee samples were obtained. We analyzed the 253 sets of paired data through hierarchical multiple regression. The results indicated thatempowering leadership had a significantly positive effect on employee engagement; autonomy need satisfaction played a mediating role in the relationship between empowering leadership and employee engagement; employees’ learning goal orientation moderated the relationship between autonomy need satisfaction and employee engagement, and it also moderated the mediating effect of autonomy need satisfaction in the relationship between empowering leadership and employee engagement.
There are three theoretical contributions as follows: Firstly, this paper confirms the positive connections between empowering leadership and employee engagement, which further enrich studies on antecedents of employee engagement. Furthermore，this paper finds that autonomy need satisfaction mediates the relationship between empowering leadership and employee engagement based on the self-determination theory, which effectively reveals the way through which empowering leadership impacts employee engagement, further diversifying studies on the mediating mechanism for the relationship between empowering leadership and employee engagement. At last, this research reveals that employees’ learning goal orientation significantly weaken the influence of autonomy need satisfaction on employee engagement, expanding studies on the boundary conditions of employee engagement.
In general, this paper reached some valuable conclusions butthere were still some limitations to be improved as follows: (1) This paper is a cross-sectional study, which is ineffective for judging causal relationship between variables; and (2) All variables in this study were derived from employee self-reports. Although we used a two-stage study design to collect data, the results were inevitably affected by the scorer factors.

Key words: empowering leadership, autonomy need satisfaction, learning goal orientation, employee engagement