Empowering Leadership as an Indirect Driver of AI Use: A Structural Equation Modeling Study of Perceived Usefulness and Perceived Ease of Use as Mediators

Sammanfattning

Although organizations increasingly invest in artificial intelligence (AI), translatingimplementation into sustained employee use remains a central challenge. This studyexamines the relationship between middle managers' empowering leadership behaviors andemployees' use of authorized AI tools within a multinational industrial company. Drawing onempowering leadership theory and the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), a conceptualmodel is developed in which perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use are proposed tomediate this relationship. Data were collected through a cross-sectional survey distributed to3,114 individual contributors, yielding a final sample of 558 respondents, and hypotheseswere tested using structural equation modeling and bootstrapped mediation analysis.The results show that empowering leadership does not directly predict actual AI use butsignificantly predicts perceived ease of use. A significant chain mediation effect wasidentified, whereby empowering leadership influences actual AI use sequentially throughperceived ease of use and then perceived usefulness. This represents the primary mechanismthrough which empowering leadership behaviors reach actual use. Perceived usefulnessemerged as the dominant driver of actual AI use overall. The findings suggest that middlemanagers are most effective when they reduce the cognitive barriers employees associatewith AI tools, rather than promoting use directly. The study contributes empirical evidence ofthe sequential pathway from empowering leadership to actual AI use and identifies perceivedease of use as the specific entry point through which middle managers operate within theTAM framework.