The majority of theory and research on empowering leadership to date has focused on how empowering leader behaviors positively influence employees, portraying those behaviors as almost ostensibly beneficial. Departing from this predominant consensus, we adopt a leader-centric perspective to explore the potential detriments that empowering leader behaviors may have for leaders themselves. Drawing from family psychology and the interpersonal theory of loneliness, we propose a leader-centric model that explains how engaging in empowering behaviors on a daily basis increases feelings of loneliness, which in turn negatively affect leaders’ psychological and physiological well-being. We further propose leader social curiosity as a leader characteristic that amplifies the detrimental impacts of empowering leader behaviors. Across a daily experience sampling study (Study 1) and a critical incident experiment (Study 2), we find consistent support for our hypotheses. Our findings highlighting the personal costs of empowering leader behaviors offer theoretical and practical implications to the literatures on leadership, loneliness, and well-being.
