<b>Empowerment Behavior as a Lever of Ethical Leadership: Unlocking Employee Productivity in Kenya's Insurance Industry</b>

This study examines the influence of the empowerment behavior dimension of ethical leadership on employee productivity within Kenya's insurance industry, addressing a substantive gap in the African organizational behavior literature. Design/Methodology/Approach: Anchored in Ethical Leadership Theory and adopting a positivist, descriptive correlational design, the study collected primary data from 192 supervisors drawn from licensed insurance and reinsurance firms in Nairobi County through stratified random sampling. Data were analyzed using Pearson correlation and simple linear regression via IBM SPSS Version 28. Findings: The empowerment behavior dimension demonstrated a very strong, positive, and statistically significant relationship with employee productivity (r = 0.985, p < 0.01), explaining 97.0% of the variance in productivity outcomes (R² = 0.970, F (1,190) = 6249.477, p < 0.001). The predictive equation confirmed that a unit increase in empowerment behavior yields a near-equivalent unit gain in employee productivity (B = 0.995, β = 0.985). Practical Implications: Insurance firms and regulatory bodies should embed empowerment-oriented leadership into supervisory recruitment, competency frameworks, and leadership development programs to unlock sustained productivity gains. Originality/Value: This study is among the first to isolate empowerment behavior as a discrete ethical leadership dimension in the Kenyan insurance context, providing rigorous empirical grounding for its role as a primary driver of employee productivity in a strategically important yet underperforming sector.