Empowerment and positive attitudes at work. Which role for gender issue?

Employee empowerment represents a critical organizational issue. Nowadays, enterprises ask for employees who are capable of responding effectively to competitive challenges that might come in the way of organizations. It is indeed suggested that employee empowerment favours the individual’s extra-role efforts and higher commitment by boosting their energy to perform. The need for empowered employees must be considered together with other contextual factors related to the labour force in organizations. Diversity management and especially gender diversity appear to be critical when empowerment is involved. Even if research in the field of empowerment has extensively analysed its relationship with work attitude, a few studies focus on gender diversity and how it influences the relationship between empowerment and positive attitude at work. This study intends to provide some insights to contribute to covering this gap. It proposes an analysis based on a large and international sample of workers to find out the influence of the presence of women in that relationship. Our results, based on a hierarchical regression analysis, show that the female presence always plays a positive role independently by the organizational role women play even if the real dimension of their presence is quite small in managerial positions. The evidence offered by the present study reveals that the presence of women can have a positive effect on managerial practices favouring reinforcement in empowerment and in turn boost positive attitude towards work. So, it can be suggested that organizations try to practise DM strategies by focusing on their female components for developing a positive attitude at work among their employees when empowerment is considered.