Abstract

Given the abundant individual and organizational outcomes of empowerment, identifying employees who can bemore empowered than others can be quite beneficial for organizations. The goal of this study was to test therelationship between both Narcissism and Machiavellianism, and psychological empowerment. To do so, 223front-line service workers working in different industries in tertiary sector in Iran were selected and data wascollected using self-reported questionnaire. The results indicated that by affecting three cognitions of impact,self-determination, and competence/self-efficacy, Narcissism positively relates to psychological empowerment.Despite the significant positive relationship between Machiavellianism and the cognition of impact,unexpectedly, no significant link between Machiavellianism and overall measure of psychological empowermentwas found. This was attributed to significant negative relationship between Machiavellianism andempowerment’s dimension of meaning. Identifying individual differences, such as Narcissism, which arepositively related to empowerment can be tremendously useful during human resource selection. In other words,the result suggests that employing individuals with some degree of healthy Narcissism can be quite fruitful forthe organizations especially those operating in the service sector.

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