Although there has been much recent attention to empowerment in public sector research, most of this research focuses on structural empowerment, rather than psychological empowerment, and thus focuses on management practices, rather than on employees’ motivational states. This article examines the processes through which transformational leadership and transactional leadership affect employees’ feelings of psychological empowerment, focusing specifically on the role of goal specificity as a mediating variable. Using data collected from state government employees, the structural equation modeling (SEM) analyses found support for hypotheses that goal specificity mediates the relationships between both transformational and transactional leadership and psychological empowerment. These results contribute to the discussion of transformational and transactional leadership approaches with regard to goal setting in the public sector and provide practical implications that public managers’ leadership behaviors can help employees develop positive attitudes toward goal specificity, which can then lead to feelings of psychological empowerment.

尽管最近在公共部门研究中越来越重视赋权，但该研究大多数侧重于结构赋权，而不是心理赋权，因此着重于管理实践，而不是员工的激励状态。本文研究了变革型领导和交易型领导通过哪些过程影响员工的心理授权感，特别关注了目标特异性作为中介变量的作用。使用从州政府雇员那里收集到的数据，结构方程模型（SEM）分析发现支持以下假设的假设：目标特异性会介导变革型和交易型领导与心理授权之间的关系。