Font Size: a A A

Influencing Mechanism Of Shared Leadership Style On Employee's Innovative Behavior

Posted on:2012-05-21Degree:DoctorType:Dissertation
Country:ChinaCandidate:H Y MeiFull Text:PDF
GTID:1119330368978386Subject:Human resources management
Abstract/Summary:PDF Full Text Request
Innovation has become the theme of economic growth and development in the twenty-first century, which determines a company or a country's sustainable competitive advantage in the future. In knowledge economy era, knowledge, information and human capital are the primary driving forces of economic development. The changes in economic growth mode bring into variation in organizational structure and management mode, such as flat organizational structure and virtual organization. As the simple work is gradually replaced by the complex work, the team-based work becomes more and more popular for management practitioners in the globalization. Team members are influenced not only by the formal team leader, but also by other team members, so the shift contributes to the leadership theory with shared leadership. The innovation theory emphasizes on the importance of the leadership style in the perception of employee's innovational work. As the frontier of leadership theory in the knowledge economy era, it is urgent to explore and study whether the shared leadership can promote organizational change and innovation or not. Therefore, it is very important to study the influencing mechanism of shared leadership style on employee's innovative behavior, which is significant to leadership theory and its practice.In this paper, the influencing mechanism of shared leadership style on employee's innovative behavior is studied based on the hypothetical deduction and logical reasoning. The technique of combining qualitative and quantitative analysis, combining theoretical and positive analysis is used in the study. First, the content, nature and characteristics of shared leadership are analyzed based on data collection and literature review. Then the hypothesis that shared transactional leadership, shared transformational leadership and shared empowering leadership influence employee's innovative behavior through psychological empowerment and the corresponding initial scales are proposed. Second, the interview method is employed to improve the description and content of the measurement items based on the logical reasoning of theoretic hypothesis. Third, in the pre-testing, the descriptive statistics, CITC and exploratory factor analysis are used to modify the scales and to improve their validity and reliability. In the formal questionnaire, the descriptive statistics, CITC, reliability test and confirmatory factor analysis are used to test the reliability and validity of the questionnaire. The correlation analysis and ANOVA of control variables are used to verify the impact of shared leadership style on employee's innovative behavior and the mediating role of psychological empowerment between shared leadership styles and employee's innovative behavior. Based on the proposing of a series of hypotheses and the verification of the theoretical model by questionnaire data, the following conclusions are drawn as follows:(1)The content of shared leadership includes the following three aspects: First, the purpose of shared leadership is to achieve the common goal of the team or organization. Second, the function of leadership can be shared by two or more team members and the leader should have the knowledge, abilities, skills that the task requires. Third,the leadership roles chang with the tasks and situation.Fourth, the influence of shared leadership is multi-directional, not only including the vertical impact of formal leadership, but also the interaction between team members. So shared leadership style can be divided into four categories:shared transactional leadership, shared transformational leadership, shared empowering leadership and shared directive leadership based on the category of vertical leadership style. This paper focuses on the influencing mechanism of the first three categories of shared leadership styles on employee's innovative behavior.(2)After literature analysis, interviews, questionnaires and data analysis, the Chinese scales of three shared leadership styles are proposed in this paper. The shared transactional leadership includes two dimensions:contingent material reward and contingent personal reward, which have four measurement items, such as "my team members give me positive feedback when I perform well" and so on. The corresponding Cronbach's alpha coefficient is 0.754. The shared transformational leadership includes four dimensions:performance expectations, inspiration and communication, vision stimulation and intellectual stimulation, which have ten measurement items, such as "my team member encourages me to go above and beyond what is normally expected of one "and so on. The corresponding Cronbach's alpha coefficient is 0.876. The shared empowering leadership includes four dimensions:encouraging opportunity thinking, participative goal setting, encouraging teamwork, encourage independent action, which have ten measurement items, such as "my team members encourage me to view unsuccessful performance as a chance to learn" and so on. The corresponding Cronbach's alpha coefficient is 0.873.(3) The theoretical model of shared leadership style, psychological empowerment and employee's innovative behavior is built and verified by utilizing ANOVA, SEM and other methods to analyze 303 valid questionnaires of consulting team, design team, R & D team and so on all over the country. It is found that shared transactional leadership (β=0.56), shared transformational leadership (β=0.57), shared empowering leadership (β= 0.60) have significant influence on employee's innovative behavior, where the shared empowering leadership has the largest direct effect on employee's innovative behavior, and shared transactional leadership has the least one. And the shared transactional leadership (β=0.49), shared transformational leadership (β=0.64), shared empowering leadership (β=0.60) have significant influence on psychological empowerment, where the shared transformational leadership has the largest direct effect on psychological empowerment, and shared transactional leadership has the least one.(4) The mediating role of psychological empowerment between shared leadership style and employee's innovative behavior are verified. The results show that the relationship between shared transactional leadership and employee's innovative behavior is partially mediated by psychological empowerment, the relationship between shared transformational leadership and employee's innovative behavior is fully mediated by psychological empowerment, and the relationship between shared empowerment leadership and employee's innovative behavior is partially mediated by psychological empowerment, where the least mediation is shared transactional leadership. It is found that whether formal or informal leadership, the power of shared transformational leadership is mainly from the authority, knowledge, charisma and other non-position power, which affecte employee's attitude and behavior through the influence of psychological perception of empowerment. However, in the shared transactional leadership, informal leadership may also affect employee's innovative behavior by the mediating role of target recognition and fairness perception, and formal leadership may directly affect employee's innovative behavior through position power and the mediating role of psychological empowerment, such as the reward and punishment. The shared empowering leadership affects employee's innovative behavior partially by the intermediary role of psychological empowerment and directly by actual empowerment behavior, such as personnel replacement right.By the exploratory research, some innovations of this paper are given as follows:First, the impacts of shared transactional leadership, shared transformational leadership, shared empowering leadership on employee's innovative behavior are built and verified. Based on the analysis of reliability, validity, and variance of control variables, the impact of shared leadership style, employee's innovative behavior and psychological empowerment are built and verified with the method of SEM. Therefore, the outcome variables of shared leadership are extended from team performance or effectiveness to employee attitude and behavior.Second, the mediating role of psychological empowerment between shared leadership styles and employee's innovative behavior is built and verified based on Baron and Kenny's (1986) study on the mediating effect, then the mechanism of shared leadership style on employee's innovative behavior was further interpreted.Third, Chinese scales of shared transactional leadership, shared transformational leadership and shared empowering leadership are developed. Specifically, the initial Chinese scales for three shared leadership styles are presented based on the English scales proposed by Pearce and Sims (2002) and Ensley etc. (2006) to guarantee high content validity and criterion validity. Then through the values of Cronbach's alpha, CITC, and exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis, the convergent validity and reliability are also guaranteed in the pre-testing and formal questionaire.
Keywords/Search Tags:Shared transactional leadership, Shared transformational leadership, Shared empowering leadership, Psychological empowerment, Employee's innovative behavior
PDF Full Text Request
Related items