Abstract The concept of meaning‐based leadership, leader advocacy of the meaning organizational purpose gives to the work, was proposed to capture the core role of leadership in organizations: motivating pursuits in the service of the organization's purpose. We study the influence of meaning‐based leadership on one such pursuit – strategy implementation. We argue that team leaders may motivate team strategy implementation efforts through meaning‐based leadership, because of this leadership's influence on team alignment around organizational values. We propose that this influence is contingent on team leader empowering leadership, such that meaning‐based leadership has a stronger influence on team value alignment, and thus indirectly on team strategy implementation, with higher empowering leadership. This research model was supported in a multi‐source survey of teams in an insurance company.