The power of empowering team leadership over time: A multi-wave longitudinal study in nuclear power plants

•Longitudinal effects of empowering team leadership (ETL) were tested in nuclear plants.•ETL predicted team job satisfaction and team safety satisfaction.•Higher initial levels of ETL showed flatter (positive) slopes on team job and safety satisfaction.•Teams with lower initial levels of ETL showed steeper (positive) slopes on job and safety satisfaction. Team attitudes in critical infrastructures are essential to achieving reliable operations despite internal and external challenges, and empowering team leadership (ETL) may be an important precursor of these attitudes. The present study aimed to test whether ETL was related to teams’ satisfaction trajectories, measured as changes in job satisfaction and safety satisfaction at three time points. Hypotheses were tested in a sample of 48 teams from two Spanish nuclear facilities in three different waves (2008, 2011, and 2014). Growth Modeling using hierarchical linear models with SPSS 20.0 revealed that ETL was positively related to initial levels of teams’ job and safety satisfaction, and that teams with greater increases in ETL over time also showed greater increases in job satisfaction and safety satisfaction over time. Implications of these findings for safety research are outlined, as well as their practical implications.