Role of empowering leadership in inducing employee green creative behavior in hotel and restaurant industry: a moderated-moderated mediation model

This study aims to contribute to empowering leadership literature by applying structure empowerment theory and multi-criteria decision method to examine “how” and under “what conditions” empowering leadership affects employee green creative behavior. Specifically, we examined employee green passion as a key process or mechanism between empowering leadership and employee green creative behavior. Furthermore, we also examined customer pressures and entrepreneurial strategy as boundary conditions by using time-lagged data collection technique, and data were collected from 473 top- and mid-level employees of hotel and restaurant industry in Pakistan. This study found positive and significant direct impact of empowering leadership on employee green passion and green creative behavior. This research found positive direct and mediating impact of green passion on green creative behavior. The findings also reveal that employees associated with low customer strategy need less resources from empowering leadership, and employees interacting through low entrepreneurial strategy need less resources from green passion. The mediated moderation effect through high entrepreneurial strategy is found insignificant. Finally, moderated-moderated mediation effect of low customer pressures and low entrepreneurial strategy is found more significant as compared to high customer pressures and high entrepreneurial strategy. Our empirical results suggest that employee green passion is used as a power-sharing mechanism between empowering leaders and green creative behavior. The current research has useful implications that for low customer pressures and low entrepreneurial strategy, followers need less resources from empowering leaders and vice versa to adopt green creative behavior.