The Study On Delegation Risk Consideration And Leaders' Delegating Behavior

Along with the market competition intensifying and organizational structure growing flat, delegation is regarded as a useful management tool to motivate employee and improve performance. However, more and more practical phenomenons show us that delegation just has remained at the idealized conceptual stage. Particularly in China, not delegating can be found everywhere. Therefore this study attempts to find reasons why manager don't want to delegate from the perspective of risk. And we hope to provide some useful information to deal with delegation problem.This paper was divided into three sections that including literature, empirical study and management strategies. Some relevant theories, concepts and studies were reviewed and summarized, including the history of the delegation study, the study about the structure and measurement of delegation. The study about how delegation acted on work attitudes, behavior and performance, as well as organizational performance, organizational innovation, management effectiveness, were also summarized. This part also included the researches about how individual characteristics, job characteristics and organizational environment factors have an impact on delegation.Based on the literature review, the exploitation working of the delegating risk questionnaire started out. According to the relevant theory and research, a construct hypothesis was put forward and then was confirmed through some in-depth interviews. The results showed us that the manager would weigh the risks on task performance, individual rights and status, as well as organization benefit when delegating. Then some useful information was collected through 48 open ended questionnaires, and an initial questionnaire of 23 items was formed. After two empirical studies, a perfect measurement scale was achieved, and the three dimension structure was verified.The second part of empirical research was to test the relationship of delegating risk consideration and leader delegating behavior, as well as employee working attitude. Through the 210 pair data of supervisor and subordinate, we found that the risk considerations of task performance and organization benefit could significantly predict the leader's delegating behavior in negative direction. Moreover, when supervisor displayed more delegation behaviors, the subordinate would consider the job was more meaningful, had higher self-efficacy, worked more autonomy, as well as thought he or she had more power to affect the job and organization. Thus these subordinates would have a higher degree of commitment to supervisor and job involvement.The third part of the empirical research was to explore the mediation effect and the moderation effect of the delegation risk consideration in delegating behavior study, which based on structure theory and relationship theory. Through the paired data from 209 supervisors and 627 subordinates, the results showed us that when the job uncertainty or the organizational formalization was high, or with high centralization, the manager would delegate less. The negative impact centralization on delegation behavior was significantly enhanced by delegation risk consideration. On the other hand, the power distance could also affect the supervisor's delegating behavior through risk consideration on the task performance and organization benefits. The negative effects between the task performance risk consideration, organizational benefit risk consideration and delegation behavior were also enhanced by the LMX relationship. When facing high risk, the LMX relationship could ease these negative impacts.The part of management strategies sorted out the inspirations that got from the above research results. Five steps were summed up to deal with the delegation plight, including to determine the delegation difficulties, initially to judge the reason, to judge whether exited task performance risk and then rights-status risk, as well as organization benefits risk. Depending on the diagnosis results, at each stage the enterprise could adopt different approaches to solve delegation's difficulty. Finally, some corresponding countermeasures were put forward from the perspective of personnel selection, organizational system and management thought.Finally, it summarized the main research conclusions, and pointed out the limitations of this study as well as the future research directions.