Crisis Recalibrates Empowerment: Structural Dominance over Psychological Pathways to Job Satisfaction in Lebanese Banking

To be successful in today's volatile business environment, organizations must create work environments that enable and empower employees, particularly during economic crises. While empowerment has been extensively studied in stable Western contexts, little is known about how empowerment mechanisms operate during severe economic downturns. This study examines the mediating role of psychological empowerment in the relationship between structural empowerment and job satisfaction within the crisis-stricken Lebanese banking sector. Quantitative data were collected from 479 bank employees using validated scales for structural empowerment, psychological empowerment, and job satisfaction. Analyses were conducted using the PROCESS macro with 5,000 bootstrap samples, controlling for seniority, gender, and age. Results reveal that structural empowerment has a strong total effect on job satisfaction (β = 0.44, p < .001), supporting H1. However, contrary to typical findings from stable contexts, psychological empowerment mediates only 15% of this relationship, with the remaining 85% representing a direct effect, supporting H2 as partial mediation. The structural-psychological empowerment link remains strong (β ≈ .49), indicating that while structures effectively shape psychological experiences, in crisis contexts, structural empowerment's tangible benefits for satisfaction operate largely independently of psychological mechanisms. This study contributes to empowerment theory by demonstrating how its mechanisms recalibrate under crisis conditions, offering evidence that in survival-threatening environments, structural supports take precedence over psychological experiences in determining employee satisfaction. Practical implications suggest Lebanese banks should prioritize transparent information systems, resource security, and role stability during economic crises, while complementing these with psychological empowerment initiatives.