As organizational environments become increasingly turbulent and complex, there is need to focus on leadership effectiveness in addressing intensified paradoxical demands. Paradoxical leadership in people management, referring to seemingly competing, yet interrelated, behaviors to meet structural and follower demands simultaneously and over time, includes five dimensions: (1) combining self-centeredness with other-centeredness; (2) maintaining both distance and closeness; (3)treating subordinates uniformly, while allowing individualization; (4) enforcing work requirements, while allowing flexibility; (5) maintaining decision control, while allowing autonomy (Zhang et al., 2015). Because the construct and the measurement of paradoxical leadership have been proposed recently, several studies in China have tested whether and how paradoxical leadership affects team innovation, and current research has not yet focused on the influence of paradoxical leadership on follower work engagement and the mechanism underlying the relationship between paradoxical leadership and work engagement. The aim of this study is to investigate “how” paradoxical leadership influences employee work engagement, and to find out “when” this influence is stronger or weaker in Chinese workplace. Drawing on the individual level, therefore, this study examined the effect of paradoxical leadership on employee work engagement and tested the mediating role of psychological empowerment as well as the moderating role of job complexity playing in the linkages between paradoxical leadership and follower work engagement. The present study tested the hypotheses using a sample of 320 employees from three state-owned enterprises in Tianjin across various sectors and collected data at three times. Established measures with high reliability and validity were used to capture the key variables. Hierarchical regression analysis was mainly conducted for data analysis. Consistent with hypotheses, it was found that: (1) paradoxical leadership is positively related to follower work engagement; (2) psychological empowerment plays a part mediating role in the relationship between paradoxical leadership and work engagement; (3) job complexity positively moderates the relationship between paradoxical leadership and psychological empowerment. When job complexity is high, paradoxical leadership is more positively related to psychological empowerment. (4) job complexity positively moderates the mediating role of psychological empowerment in the relationship between paradoxical leadership and work engagement. Specifically, when job complexity is high, psychological empowerment mediates the relationship between paradoxical leadership and work engagement; when job complexity is low, however, the mediating effect is not significant. In conclusion, by investigating the effect of paradoxical leadership on follower work engagement and the mechanism and moderating condition in the process, our study extends the current literature in three ways. First, we examined the influence of paradoxical leadership on follower work engagement, extending the research scope of paradoxical leadership study. Furthermore, we found that the mediating role of psychological empowerment in the relationship between paradoxical leadership and psychological empowerment, providing extra knowledge to understand the mechanism in paradoxical leadership effectiveness. Finally, this study helped to understand the moderation condition of the paradoxical leader effectiveness through job complexity, which induced the different level of psychological empowerment indirectly affecting the relationship between paradoxical leadership and work engagement. And the conclusion of the study has important reference value for enhancement of employee work engagement for enterprise leaders.