There’s no shortage of research-backed guidance on how to be a better leader in corporate environments. Check the shelves at any airport bookstore if you doubt that.

Less common, though, is insight into how to be a better follower. That’s part of what drove a new article by Poole College leadership scholar Brad Kirkman. In “Why Do Bootlickers Get Empowered More Than Boat-Rockers? The Effects of Voice and Helping on Empowering Leadership Through Threat and Goal Congruence Perceptions,” Kirkman and co-authors at the University of Oklahoma, Texas A&M University, Purdue University, and Huazhong University of Science and Technology investigated this question using several studies. The article appears in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

Kirkman and his peers assessed leaders’ willingness to empower two types of employees: those who routinely support the leader’s actions (the “supportive voice” group) and those who regularly challenge them (the “challenge voice” group). In most situations, they found, leaders are more likely to entrust greater authority to supportive-voice workers. But challengers close the gap when they also engage in “leader-directed helping”—willingness to go above and beyond their job duties to help their leaders and the organization.

Leaders’ empowerment choices merit study because of their potential benefits for everyone in the workplace.

“Empowerment makes leaders more, not less, powerful because it gives them the time to focus on the things they’re supposed to be focused on,” said Kirkman, who is the General (Ret.) H. Hugh Shelton Distinguished Professor of Leadership. “It also develops their employees to become more effective as well, because they’re taking on more responsibility.. So it’s a win-win for the organization.”

Kirkman recently discussed the origins of the new article, its implications for workers and how it fits with the disruptor ethos embraced by some tech companies.

Q: Why was this particular question interesting to you?

A: We know why empowerment is good. We have lots of data on that, but we also know that leaders don’t use it as much as they should. And we wanted to know more about that from the follower perspective.

We see that people who use challenging voice are empowered a lot less, and people who use supportive voice are empowered a lot more. That would be fine if we also had data showing that challenging voice is a negative thing for the company. But it’s actually the opposite. Leaders are basically taking a positive action that an employee is doing, and they’re punishing that person by disempowering them. Challenging voice and supportive voice both result in all these positive outcomes that companies should care about. 

The key for a good study is also to say, “Yeah, but why is that happening?” So we looked at a three-step model where step one is the employee using either challenging or supportive voice and the last one is the leader’s choice to empower or not empower that employee.

In that middle step, the leader perceives a higher threat level if the employee uses challenging voice, and the leader empowers them less. With supportive voice employees, the leader perceives more goal congruence, and they empower them more. That’s the chain we tested and wanted to understand more.

Q: There’s this idea, particularly in the tech industry, that being a disruptor is a good thing. This study seems to say the opposite. What do you make of that?

A: The first slogan that comes to mind when you think about the Silicon Valley ethos is “move fast and break things.” That’s what they do. And what’s funny about that is, the rest of corporate America is like not going to do that as much. Walmart doesn’t want to move fast and break things. IBM doesn’t want to do that. That’s not for them, right? They’re much more conservative cultures. They’re going to move a little slower and try not to break a bunch of stuff. So I think certain industries and certain arenas like Silicon Valley startups or entrepreneurial ventures absolutely value challengers. But for most organizations, leaders don’t view disruption as very beneficial.

Q: Why is it important for leaders to empower workers?

A: There’s an acronym we use to describe the business environment we live in today: VUCA. That means volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. And every day, the world is more VUCA than it was the day before. 

Things are changing at lightning speed, and there’s no way for leaders to be able to carry the burden of doing all the important work by themselves. We need everybody to take more responsibility and leadership, especially the front line workers who are doing the actual jobs. They’re the ones who have the most knowledge about their jobs and what’s happening with their customers and clients. 

It seems like we focus almost 100 percent of our time on leaders. Maybe we’re missing half the equation. What can we tell followers that would help their leaders empower them more? This is one of the first attempts to do that.

Q: What would you want them to take from this research?

A: I want them to know you don’t have to be passive and just wait to be empowered. You can do things that would make your leader feel more comfortable empowering you. One of those things is combining challenging voice with leader-directed helping behavior.

And if you want to use supportive voice and speak in favor of your leaders and organization, fantastic. That’s going to get you more empowerment for sure.