Drawing on social information processing theory, we examined the mechanism as well as the boundary condition between empowering leadership and employee proactive behavior. Moving beyond the perspectives that have been suggested in prior studies, we provided a new account that was based on the social information processing perspective and proposed that empowering leadership would have a curvilinear effect (i.e., inverted U-shaped) on employee proactive behavior via perceived leader effectiveness. In addition, we predicted that employee’s empowerment expectation would moderate the effect of empowering leadership on perceived leader effectiveness, as well as the indirect effect of empowering leadership on employees’ proactive behavior. The proposed hypotheses were generally supported in a time-lagged data of 402 subordinates and their 97 supervisors; however, there was no moderating effect of employees’ empowerment expectation. We discussed both theoretical and practical implications and identified the directions for future research.
