After the COVID-19 outbreak, companies tried various measures to achieve the psychological stability of their members and corporate goals in a changed work environment and an unstable environment. Empowering leadership"s role is to create positive organizational performance by giving members maximum autonomy and authority(Arnold, Arad, Rhoades, & Drasgow, 2000), creating an efficient work environment and having autonomy and expertise to change innovative behavior positively(Choi, Kim & Chang, 2013). Innovative behavior is an important factor for an organization"s competitive advantage and growth amid changes in the aviation industry environment and global economic crisis. According to previous studies on innovation behavior, Scott & Bruce(1994) said that the activity of intentionally creating and applying new ideas to improve the performance of the organization or the work role of the members is called innovative behavior, and that it is related to the preceding factors such as individual characteristics, job characteristics, and leadership style as triggers for innovation behavior(Oldham & Cummings, 1996). This study derived the relationship between empowering leadership, job engagement, and innovative behavior. Based on the results of empowering leadership behaviors such as job role, decision-making participation, performance confidence, and organizational autonomy on the behavior of members through Ahearne et al.(2005)’s research. First, results show that airline empowering leadership will have a positive effect(+) on job engagement and innovative behavior. Second, all of the research finds that job engagement would have a positive(+) effect on innovative behavior. Third, the mediating effect of job engagement was verified in the relationship between empowering leadership and innovative behavior. Airline cabin crew members has a positive effect on innovative behavior by maintaining smooth communication when responding to passengers on board and solving problems with creative ideas to increase work performance. Airlines need to present a vision to cabin crew through the leader"s empowering leadership and make efforts to increase innovative behavior of cabin
crew by providing authority, work autonomy, information sharing, and training. It can be seen that job engagement plays an important role in securing the company"s competitiveness through cabin crew members" active innovation behavior. Through the empirical analysis of this study, the results show that the empowering leadership behavior of team leaders in airline cabins should be managed as a human resource management plan that can promote cabin crew members" job enthusiasm and innovative behavior.