Empowering Leadership and Organizational Justice in the New Normal

Although prior works have primarily focused on positive outcomes resulting from empowering leadership in normal workplace environments, scant research in this realm has examined whether empowering leadership is actually associated with more desirable outcomes in new-normal workplaces (i.e., online and hybrid work environments). We draw from theories of control and media richness to explore how empowering leadership in new working environments influences perceptions of fairness among employees with varying degrees of media richness. We also investigate how media richness and employees’ digital literacy moderate this relationship. Specifically, we theorize that empowering leadership increases perceived fairness among employees, which is curvilinearly moderated by media richness. We further theorize that employees’ digital literacy changes the curvilinear moderating effect. In Study 1, with a between-subjects experimental design, we show that video conferencing had the highest moderating effect on the empowering leadership and fairness perception than face-to-face, SNS, phone call, or email communication. Study 2, a three-wave longitudinal survey study during the COVID-19 lockdown period, supported our three-way interaction model’s curvilinear moderating effect. These findings enable us to identify a novel mechanism of how virtual work plays a role in the relationship between empowering leadership and perceived organizational justice.