Although previous research has found that authentic leadership has a negative effect on employee burnout through structural empowerment, lack of psychological empowerment in the research cannot present a complete picture on how authentic leadership influences burnout because employees must experience being psychologically empowered for empowerment to be effective. Drawing on empowerment-related theories, this study integrates the three different perspectives of empowerment (authentic leadership, structural empowerment, and psychological empowerment) to examine their effects on emotional exhaustion, the core component of burnout, at multiple levels of analysis. Using a sample of 378 teachers from 59 primary and secondary schools in China, multilevel structural equation modelling results revealed that: (1) authentic leadership had an indirect effect on psychological empowerment partially through structural empowerment, (2) psychological empowerment played a full mediating role in the relationship between structural empowerment and emotional exhaustion, and (3) structural empowerment and psychological empowerment sequentially mediated the effect of authentic leadership on emotional exhaustion. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

The present study’s objective is to create a Spanish adaptation of the Conditions of Work Effectiveness Questionnaire II (CWEQ-II) by Laschinger, Finegan, Shamian, and Wilk (2004) in order to measure structural empowerment in an organizational context. To do so, this study was conducted in two distinct phases. In the first, a group of experts carried out a back-translation of the questionnaire and in the second phase, we analyzed the questionnaire’s internal structure (through exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis) and external validity. The resulting Spanish version of the questionnaire (CWEQ-S) demonstrated/exhibited good factor structure and good psychometric properties as far as reliability and validity are concerned.