Empowering leadership is known to enhance employees’ in-role and extra-role performance. However, given unprecedented uncertainty with constantly changing conditions, employee role requirements rapidly become misaligned with organizational goals. Thus, mere in- and extra-role behavior could be insufficient for organizational effectiveness. Instead, employees must go beyond role expectations by engaging in task revision (i.e., proactively correcting faulty instructions, procedures, or role expectations to ensure organizational goals are met). Despite its importance, it remains unclear whether empowering leadership can encourage this counter-role behavior, which inherently involves challenging formal role prescriptions. Extending motivation-based accounts, we posit that empowering leadership emboldens employees by enhancing their risk propensity and, ultimately, task revision. Additionally, we argue that leader group prototypicality moderates the empowering leadership-risk propensity relationship, enhancing or neutralizing empowering leadership’s positive effect on risk propensity. Using a longitudinal design, we test our risk propensity mechanism against three alternative motivation-based mechanisms, including psychological empowerment. Our findings support our conceptual model and confirm that recognizing task revision as an outcome, risk propensity as a mediator, and leader group prototypicality as a moderator of empowering leadership offers significant theoretical contributions. Furthermore, we introduce and validate a task revision scale for field research.
