Empowering leadership and human resources through stimulating innovative behaviors in higher education

In the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, 4IR or Industry 4.0, since highly advanced technology largely replaced human works, many production activities of both goods and services were required to be innovative. The purposes of this study were to examine the role of energizing self-efficacy as a mediator of leadership empowering and innovative behavior to analyze the mediator’s role of affective commitment between the two. A survey method was used by distributing online questionnaires to 617 lecturers in Indonesia. For researching the interrelation of empowering leadership, energizing self-efficacy, affective commitment, and innovative behavior via statistical examination of their interrelationship, we applied Stata 13 software to test the hypotheses. The results pinpointed the significant impact of empowering leadership on affective commitment, energizing self-efficacy, and innovative behavior. Energizing self-efficacy significantly influenced innovative behavior, but the impact vice versa is not significant. There was an indirect effect of empowering leadership on innovative behavior through energizing self-efficacy, but the affective commitment was not a mediator between empowering leadership and innovative behavior. These findings indicated that lecturers could stimulate their innovative behaviors by increasing their self- efficacy through empowering leadership. Our research findings highlight the importance of enhancing innovative behavior, self-efficacy, and empowering leadership.