Empowering leadership as a secure base:enhancing organizational identification via age-contingent employee resilience

In the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) era, employee resilience extends beyond a mere trait to serve as a critical strategic asset. Departing from the transactional logic of social exchange theory, this study adopts an attachment theory perspective to propose a paradigm shift. Within this framework, empowering leaders function as a secure base for their followers. And resilience emerges as the core mechanism through which such leadership behaviors foster a stronger sense of organizational identification. Furthermore, rather than assuming uniform effects, employee age is identified as a boundary condition that moderates the effectiveness of this process.

Data were collected through a three-wave, time-lagged survey (N = 218) with two-week intervals among employees in the high-pressure Pearl River Delta (PRD) region of China. Hypotheses were tested using the SPSS PROCESS macro (Models 4 and 7) with 5,000 bootstrap resamples to ensure the robustness of the proposed moderated mediation framework.

Empowering leadership is positively associated with both employee resilience and organizational identification. Mediation analysis confirms that resilience is the key psychological mechanism linking leadership behaviors to organizational attitudes. Importantly, employee age significantly moderates the relationship between empowering leadership and resilience: the positive effect of empowering leadership on resilience is stronger for older employees and weaker for younger employees. Consequently, the indirect effect of empowering leadership on organizational identification through resilience is significantly more pronounced among older employees, supporting the hypothesized moderated mediation model.

By shifting the paradigm from a transactional "quid pro quo" framing to an attachment-based perspective, this study advances the literature on resilience by demonstrating that resilience is cultivated through relational security rather than simple reciprocity. The findings challenge the prevailing "one-size-fits-all" approach and offer an age-contingent framework for resilience management. Practical insights are provided for fostering a resilient and committed multi-generational workforce in high-intensity environments by linking micro-level leadership behaviors with macro-level organizational identification through a lifespan developmental perspective.