Research On Differentiated Empowering Leadership In The Team Context

Owing to the rapidly changing organizational environment, leaders often empower their followers with more autonomy and authority and expect them to take conscientious actions to enhance the organizational effectiveness. Hence, empowering leadership has attracted tremendous attention from both management scholars and practitioners. However, with the blossom of team-based work structures, the slow development of team-focused empowering leadership research has divorced from the rapidly changing management practice. Thus, the existing research of team-focused empowering leadership can hardly provide any insightful suggestions and ideas to team-based management practice. Based on the observation of team-focused management practices, one of the recent problems of team-focused empowering leadership is whether to empower differently or equally within teams. Accordingly, the main purpose of this dissertation was to construct the concept of differentiated empowering leadership and deeply explore its content, antecedents and impacts, as well as its underlying mechanisms and boundary conditions.In the first part of this dissertation, the concept of differentiated empowering leadership was defined basing on the literature review of empowering leadership and differentiated leadership. Specifically, in the section one of part one, the developing venation, definition, measurement, antecedents and impacts of empowering leadership and differentiated leadership have been reviewed. Moreover, the limitations of existing literature of empowering leadership and differentiated leadership have been discussed. Then, the necessity for constructing differentiated empowering leadership was discussed in the section two of part one. Meanwhile, this section outlined the definition, conceptual nature, and operationalization, as well as the difference to other concepts of differentiated leadership, of differentiated empowering leadership.In the second part of this dissertation, four empirical studies were conducted in two stages to explore the content, antecedents and impacts of differentiated empowering leadership. Study one in the first stage explored the definition and antecedents of differentiated empowering leadership using hybrid research strategy. Based on the grounded theory analysis with four team samples, differentiated empowering leadership was defined and found to be affected by leader-member exchange differentiation, difference of proactivity within team members, and difference of ability within team members. Samples from69teams (266team members) also supported that LMX differentiation and difference of proactivity within team members were the two key antecedents of differentiated empowering leadership. However, the relationship between difference of ability within team members and differentiated empowering leadership was not found.Study one in the second stage examined the relationship between differentiated empowering leadership and team performance, as well as the underlying mechanism and boundary conditions. Samples from92teams supported that differentiated empowering leadership was negatively related to team performance via intra-team interactional justice climate. Moreover, team power distance was found to be the boundary condition of such relationship as discussed above. Specifically, comparing to the teams with high power distance, the negative mediating relationship between differentiated empowering leadership and team performance via intra-team interactional justice climate was more significant in the teams with low power distance.Study two in the second stage explored the cross-level relationship between differentiated empowering leadership and team members’extra-role performance, counterproductive work behaviors. This research model was tested using a sample of353team members from92teams. The results showed that the differentiated empowering leadership affected team members’extra-role performance and counterproductive work behaviors via trust in leaders. Moreover, the results also showed that the mediating (or indirect) relationship of differentiated empowering leadership and team members’ extra-role performance and counterproductive work behaviors via trust in leaders was more salient among team members with low traditionality than among team members with high traditionality.Study three in the second stage examined the moderating role of differentiated empowering leadership in the mediating relationship between team-focused shared empowering leadership and team members’ taking charge via role-breadth self-efficacy. Data from353team members of92teams provide support for this model. In addition, the results showed that team members’ power distance orientation had a three-way interactive effect on the moderating effect of differentiated empowering leadership. Specifically, the moderating effect of differentiated empowering leadership is found to be significant only among team members who have a low power distance orientation.Finally, the main findings and limitations, as well as the future research directions, of this dissertation were concluded.