Abstract

The purpose of the present study is the investigation of distributed leadership agency. DLA is an activity-based concept, which is defined as employees’ active participation in leadership tasks. By combining a descriptive and a normative approach DLA has the potential of real employee empowerment. It can protect from arbitrary managerial power and lead to employees’ personal development through sharing organizational resources, influencing leadership activities and joint decision making in companies. The study examines individually perceived autonomy as an antecedent and employees’ occupational self-efficacy as an outcome of DLA over time. Furthermore, the study tests the mediating role of DLA on the autonomy – self-efficacy relationship. The two-wave study applied an online survey in a Danish municipality with a time lag of seven months. We used regression analyses for testing the cross-sectional as well as cross-lagged relationships and an autoregressive model for analyzing the half-longitudinal mediation. The results revealed a significant positive effect of DLA on employees’ occupational self-efficacy cross-sectionally at Time 1 and Time 2, as well as cross-lagged. The cross-sectional and cross-lagged findings also support a significant positive impact of autonomy on DLA. However, DLA only mediated the autonomy–self-efficacy relationship cross-sectionally, but not over time. Computed alternative causal models corroborate the proposed direction of our hypothesized relationships. These results provide first evidence that structural features such as autonomy are timely prior to action-related behavior, and that participating in leadership tasks enhances employees’ occupational self-efficacy.