Empowerment

Leadership exerts an important influence on employee innovation. An increasing number of studies showed that leadership is a key factor promoting innovation, that is, support and encouragement from leaders have a significant positive influence on employees' innovation. The more a leader delegates rights to employees, and the more the support and encouragement given to employees, the more the creativity demonstrated by the employees. Leadership empowering behavior emphasizes that employees share information and rights to gain opportunities to participate in decision making, strengthen their intrinsic motivation and stimulate their innovative behavior. In addition, leadership empowering behavior can enhance employees' sense of belonging and commitment to the organization and improve their satisfaction at work, influencing them to think about the organization as much as possible, thereby improving their work performance and generating increased innovation behavior. This outcome is conducive to an organization to generate other innovative activities. Therefore, this research examines the influence of leadership empowering behavior on employees' innovation behavior from three aspects, that is, personal development support, participative decision making and delegation of authority, and proposes the following hypotheses:

The literature on employee innovation points out that participative decision making and personal development support are important prerequisites for generating innovative results. Based on this idea, Amabile et al. found that leaders' empowering behavior can give employees increased decision-making power and opportunities to make choices by delegating rights to employees and enabling them to make decisions and take action without direct supervision or intervention. This approach can encourage and empower employees to explore various creative solutions before determining feasible solutions and improve the output efficiency of innovation results. Zhang and Bartol conducted an empirical analysis to verify the influence of leadership empowering behavior on employees' innovation behavior and determined that leadership empowering behavior can increase employees' enthusiasm to solve problems, give them considerable freedom, stimulate their creativity and promote their innovation.

At the same time, social exchange theory asserts that leaders can establish high-quality reciprocal exchange relationships with employees through delegation of authority, personal development support, encouragement to participate in decision making and work guidance, which can promote employees' positive behavior and generate positive results for the organization. Therefore, based on the literature on leadership empowering behavior and social exchange theory, this study divides leadership empowering behavior into three dimensions, that is, personal development support, participative decision making and delegation of authority, and proposes the following hypotheses:

Thriving at work is a psychological state of an employee and obtained through learning and by experiencing vigor at work. Learning refers to the enhancement of self-confidence and strength through knowledge and skills, and vigor represents employees' high level of energy at work. Empowering leadership can help employees build confidence, encourage them to try new methods and promote continuous learning. In addition, empowering leadership invites employees to participate in corporate management decisions and allows them to express different opinions, thereby giving them sufficient rights to solve problems and increasing their enthusiasm for work. Furthermore, empowering leadership pays attention to employees' sense of happiness at work and enhances their sense of belonging by satisfying their communication and emotional needs, thereby improving their work vigor. Employees' self-confidence, work autonomy and sense of belonging are conducive to stimulate their sense of thriving at work.

Employees' innovative and proactive behaviors have obvious characteristics based typically on a positive and optimistic work attitude, and thriving at work reflects employees' positive emotional state. When employees experience positive emotions generated through learning and vigor at work, they will deeply ponder their activities and promote the generation of innovative ideas. Employees promote the construction of their resource system and innovation behavior through learning and by maintaining vigor at work. Therefore, when employees have a high sense of thriving at work, they will have a strong desire to gain new knowledge and skills and will be able to use new methods and technologies in various ways to engage in challenging work and adapt to the dynamic needs of their organization. Employees with a high sense of thriving at work tend to spread new knowledge and skills in the organization and expend a considerable amount of energy on practice, which can promote their innovation performance. When employees have a sense of thriving at work, they can improve their innovation ability through active learning and by maintaining their vigor and demonstrate innovative proactive behavior exceeding the requirements of their work. Therefore, this study proposes the following hypotheses:

The effect of empowering leadership on employees' personal development support will enhance employees' intrinsic motivation and willingness to engage in complex, creative, proactive and self-directed activities. In addition, it can enhance sense of effectiveness of employees' role width perception, increase their confidence in performing comprehensive tasks outside of work and improve their proactive work performance. In the process of participating in decision making, employees will sense their leaders' support for their personal development. Based on this concept, this study proposes the following hypothesis: