The Characteristics And Effectiveness Mechanism Of Team Initiative Under Organizational Change

This study focuses upon initiative on the team level under organizational change. In order to reveal the construct of team initiative, its main characteristics and effectiveness mechanism, Four studies were conducted.Study one was based on grounded theory. Twenty-seven top managers from 20 enterprises were interviewed in depth. Then the open code, axis code and selective code were executed. Team initiative was a kind of collective constructs, It mainly concerned with the behaviors for dealing with environment change, grasping future opportunities and preventing existed problems. It is one of the most important group dynamic elements under change. It had three typical characteristics: team-driven, collaboration, adaptation. These three dimensions reflected team initiative's dynamic basis, action process and sustainability mechanism.Study two used multiple methods to measure and compare team initiative. It could be measured by questionnaires and retrospective behavior measure . Both of them could grasp its nature and they had quite high convergence validity. There were significant differences of team initiative among different industries, ownerships, teams and changes. Teams from private enterprises and joint ventures in the IT industry and were experiencing internationalization, corporate entrepreneurship and merge showed higher level of team initiative.In team studies affective, cognitive and behavioral mediating processes were paid more attention. Study three explored the influencing factors and effectiveness mechanism of team initiative. Data analysis was based on 108 teams from 98 enterprises. The study focused on the team change effectiveness construction and measured change performance which including performance indicatore, executing indicator and psychological indicator. It was found that change task interdependence, cooperative goal interdependence were correlated with team initiative positively. Decision power centralization was correlated with team initiative negatively. Expertise distribution was correlated with team initiative positively. Team effectiveness and team safety perception were correlated with team initiative positively and they played a mediator role in the relationship between change task character, team structure character and team initiative. Team initiative and team change task performance, team change contextual performance were correlated positively. Transactive memory system (TMS) was correlated with team performance and it was a moderator between the relationship of team initiative and team change performance.Study four further took an integrative approach. Team cognitive process was dealed as one important moderator in the link between team behavior and team effectiveness. Results from the experiment which was based on the true organizational change case showed that TMS was correlated with team change performance and It played an important moderating role in the relationship between team initiative and team effectiveness. Only under the mixture of high team initiative and high TMS the highest performance could be gained. Further, this study found that Lewin's change model could be used to explain the developing stages of team initiative.Research results were concluded systematically and discussed, related theory development were summarized. The limitations of these studies were also pointed and new issues for future research were proposed.