Always a good thing? The resource perspective to understand the double‐edged sword effect of empowering leadership on employee expediency

Abstract Prior studies have documented the positive effects of empowering leadership on task efficiency. However, this research stream has largely overlooked that employees might promote task efficiency through potentially unethical means. Given that expediency represents a covert, less morally intense, yet prevalent form of unethical behaviour for task efficiency, we introduce a novel resource‐based perspective to explore when and how empowering leadership positively or negatively influences employee expediency. Drawing upon the conservation of resources theory, we contend that empowering leadership is positively related to employee expediency via increased emotional exhaustion when task complexity is higher, but it also reduces expediency via decreased emotional exhaustion when task complexity is lower. Results from a two‐wave field study ( N = 236) and two pre‐registered scenario‐based experiments ( N s = 213, 230) consistently supported our hypotheses. We contribute to the literature on empowering leadership, employee expediency and work design.