Recent studies on empowering leadership have challenged the conventional understanding that empowering leadership facilitates positive workplace outcomes and cautioned about the possibility of its negative effects and boundary conditions of its positive effects, suggesting that it can, at times, be burdensome to employees. This study aimed to examine when and how empowering leadership might be perceived as burdensome by employees. We developed our model based on the transactional model of stress (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984) which provides a foundation to understanding how individuals appraise and cope with stress. Specifically, we suggested that the effect of empowering leadership on employee creativity is mediated by two types of stress—challenge and hindrance, and employees’ neuroticism moderates the mediating relationships. Two field studies using time-lagged multisource survey data from leader-follower dyads showed that empowering leadership positively influences employee creativity by increasing challenge stress and decreasing hindrance stress particularly for employees with lower neuroticism. However, for those with higher neuroticism, the mediating effects were found to be nonsignificant. These findings help understand when and how empowering leadership can be taxing for employees and suggest a new distinct mechanism through which empowering leadership fosters employee creativity from a stress perspective.
