Introduction

To date, employees’ well-being in the workplace has received considerable attention from scholars. Since researchers observed that places where people experience higher well-being have lowered the probability that they will develop various diseases, such as heart disease, diabetes and cancer, and lowered the mortality of those diseases (Lawless and Lucas, 2011), an interest in the quality of their lives is growing (Diener and Tay, 2015). In accordance with this trend, more studies that examine various work-related variables associated with employee well-being are being conducted in the field of management (e.g. Conway et al., 2015; Li et al., 2016; Panaccio and Vandenberghe, 2009). Despite the widely recognized importance of well-being, there are several limitations in the prior studies, making subsequent research efforts necessary that look into employee well-being in a work setting. First, the well-being research has mostly been conducted in the field of psychology, focusing on individuals’ daily experiences, emotions and generic attributes as antecedents to their happiness (e.g. Brannan et al., 2013; Diener and Tay, 2015; Gallagher and Vella-Brodrick, 2008). It is not enough to offer managerial implications for organizational members’ well-being and its predictors. Although some management scholars have attempted to examine the relationship between organizational support and well-being (e.g. Panaccio and Vandenberghe, 2009; Park et al., 2017), such research is still very rare, warranting ongoing scholarly attention. Second, most previous studies that focused on the relationship between social support and well-being were limited to measurements of specific facets of well-being, such as job satisfaction, family satisfaction, life stress and employee mental health (e.g. Heaney et al., 1995; Parasuraman et al., 1992; Stamper and Johlke, 2003). Given the lack of sufficient research on the relationship between employees’ social relationships and well-being in workplaces in the extant literature, this paper identifies how empowering leadership influences employees’ overall well-being from the social exchange and support perspective. Third, despite accumulating research findings pertaining to the effects of empowering leadership, previous empowering leadership studies were largely implemented within the western cultural context (e.g. Arnold et al., 2000; Pearce and Sims, 2002; Srivastava et al., 2006). Scholars recently reported that the effectiveness of leadership was different in Asian countries because of their unique cultural backgrounds. For example, Korean employees are inclined to feel obliged to reciprocate more strongly and accordingly react more positively than western employees when they experience positive and supportive behaviors by their leaders because Korean culture is deeply rooted in Confucian principles (Chai et al., 2016; Han et al., 2017; Lee, 2012). Thus, it is necessary to revisit the effects of empowering leadership on employee outcomes such as well-being in Asian countries.