Study On Team Leader Empowering Behavior:Antecedents And Influencing Mechanism On Team Performance

With the development of economic globalization and regional economic integration, the external environment of organizations is increasingly competitive. In this context, enterprises have not relied on traditional factors such as size, role clarity and specialization to build and maintain their competitive advantage. In order to build the core competitiveness for higher performance and more flexibility, an increasing number of companies turned to enhancing organizational flexibility, integration and innovation capability. In this process, organization empowerment plays an increasingly important role. Faced with the competitive competitiveness of lower costs, higher performance and more flexibility, more and more enterprises were using work team as the basic unit of work in taking up commercial activities and achieving goals, while designing flat organizational structure. Knowledge-based team is one of the fastest growing team types in knowledge economy era, which has a crucial impact on business innovation and competitive advantage in companies. Empowerment as a novel management action has an important impact on knowledge-based team. Therefore, recently researches about antecedents of (team) leader empowering behavior and it’s influencing mechanism on team performance has became hot issues for relevant scholars and practitioners.With many years of development, empowerment has been an important concept in modern organizational theory. Empowerment frequently appeared in the field of academic research, management training courses and management books. At the same time, there are more and more cases about successful implementation of empowerment at home and abroad. But past experience has shown that there are series of problems during the implementation of empowerment. Such as, some managers do not want to implement empowerment. The leadership empowerment behavior has poor impact. In the knowledge-based team of enterprises in China, what factors can influence the team leader empowering behavior? What is the influencing mechanism from team leader empowering behavior to team performance? And we should further explore these issues. Following the logic that "the trust from team leader to team member, the scene characteristics of team leaderâ†'team leader empowering behaviorâ†'team psychological empowermentâ†'team performance" and basing on social exchanged theory, leadership substitutes theory and cognitive evaluation theory, this paper integrates team leader empowering behavior, team psychological empowerment, trust from team leader to team member, working environment uncertainty, organizational centralization, organizational formalization, team proactive personality and team performance into a global analytical framework. In this paper we explored the antecedents of team leader empowering behavior and the influence mechanism on team performance about knowledge-based team under the Chinese cultural background. Specifically, the discussion about antecedents of team leader empowering behavior contributes to understand the motivation of team leader. At the same time, it can guide companies to take effective and reasonable measures to protect the validity of team leader empowering behavior. The investigation about influencing mechanism of team leader empowering behavior to team performance can interpret it’s potency mechanism. In addition, it also can explain the reasons about inefficient and invalid of team leader empowering behavior.This dissertation contains introduction and text, which is divided into six chapters:Chapter1:Introduction. This chapter outlines the general content of dissertation, which includes the background and research questions, significances, innovations, methodology and structure of the paper.Chapter2:Literature review. Firstly, according to the research logic, we define the concept and intension about the core variables. Defining the basic variables can effectively avoid conceptual confusion and misunderstanding, and lay the foundation for variables quantization as well as analysis of relationship between variables. Based on reviewing and carding about the antecedents of (team) leader empowering behavior, we found that only a relatively small number studies had explored this subject, systemic analysis framework had not yet formed. Based on reviewing and carding about the influencing mechanism of (team) leader empowering behavior on (team) performance, we found that only a relatively small number studies had explored this subject. There has been no research exploring the role of team proactive personality in this process. Almost no studies have examined the mechanism under the Chinese cultural background.Chapter3:Research framework and hypothesis. Based on literature reviewing, initially expound the underlying theory, which includes social exchange theory, leadership substitute theory and social cognitive theory. And then we construct the research framework about antecedents of team leader empowering behavior and the influence mechanism on team performance. Finally, we assume the specific issues and construct the conceptual model.Chapter4:Research design and data collection. At first, we briefly introduce the designing principle and processe of questionnaire. Based on the operational conception of basic variables, we develop measurement scale and build questionnaire. We improve and change the questionnaire by the pre-research, and obtain the sample data by large-scale survey. Finally, we preliminary statistic and treat the sample data, in order to lay the foundation for subsequent empirical analysis.Chapter5:Data analysis and’hypothesis testing. Firstly, we analyze the reliability and validity of each variable scale. At the same time, we determine the dimension structure of each variable. Next, we test hypothesizes of antecedents of team leader empowering behavior and the influence mechanism on team performance, basing on the applicability analysis of multiple linear regression. Finally, we summarize the situation about hypothesis testing,Chapter6:Research conclusions and prospection. Firstly, we explain and investigate the research conclusions basing on the underlying theory, academic findings and practical experience. And then we can get a comprehensive understanding about the antecedents of team leader empowering behavior and the influence mechanism on team performance of knowledge-based team under the Chinese cultural background. Next, we summarize the theoretical contributions and practical enlightenment of dissertation. Finally, we explore the limitations and future prospection.Specifically, the study results about antecedents of team leader empowering behavior show:(1)Both cognitive and affective trust from team leader to team member can significantly promote team leader empowering behavior (decision-making participation; information sharing; helping-guiding behavior). The relationship between affective trust and information sharing, help and guide is stronger. There is no difference between two kinds trust and decision-making participation.(2)The working environment uncertainty has a significant positive impact on help and guide behavior, which has no significant influence on decision-making participation and information sharing behavior.(3)The organizational centralization has a significant negative impact on team leader empowering behavior. The relationship between organizational centralization and helping-guiding behavior is the strongest among them, and then is decision-making participation behavior, finally is the information sharing behavior.(4)The organizational formalization has a significant positive impact on information sharing behavior, which has no significant influence on decision-making participation and helping-guiding behavior.(5)The working environment uncertainty has significant positive moderating effect on the relationship between the trust from team leader to team member and team leader empowering behavior. The higher of working environment uncertainty, the extent about impact of trust on decision-making participation, information sharing and helping-guiding behavior is greater.(6)The organizational centralization has significant positive moderating effect on the relationship between the trust from team leader to team member and team leader empowering behavior. The higher of organizational centralization, the extent about impact of trust on decision-making participation, information sharing and help-guide behavior is greater.(7)The organizational formalization has negative moderating effect on the relationship between the trust from team leader to team member and helping-guiding behavior. The higher of organizational formalization, the extent about impact of trust on information sharing behavior is smaller.The study results about influencing mechanism of team leader empowering behavior on team performance show:(1)The team leader empowering behavior has significant positive effect on team performance. Decision-making participation, information sharing and helping-guiding behavior have significant positive impact on team performance.(2)The team proactive personality plays a positive moderating role in the relationship between team leader empowering behavior and team performance. The higher of team proactive personality, the extent of impact about team leader empowering behavior on team performance is greater.(3)The team leader empowering behavior has a significant positive impact on team psychological empowerment.(4)The team proactive personality plays a positive moderating role in the relationship between team leader empowering behavior and team psychological empowerment. The higher of team proactive personality, the extent of impact about team leader empowering behavior on team psychological empowerment is greater.(5)The team psychological empowerment has a significant positive impact on team performance.(6)The team psychological empowerment plays a locally mediating role in the reciprocal influence from team leader empowering behavior and team proactive personality to team performance.All conclusions mentioned above let us have a more systematic and in-depth understanding of antecedents of team leader empowering behavior and it’s influencing mechanism on team performance. Based on existing conclusions, we get some innovative contributions as follows:First, this study puts forward both an overall framework about antecedents of team leader empowering behavior and development of theoretical system. We make systematic analysis on the antecedents of team leader empowering behavior from two perspectives of the trust from team leader to team member and the scene characteristics of team leader in the context of knowledge-based team under the Chinese cultural background. On this basis, we examine the moderating role of the scene characteristics of team leader in the relationship between the trust from team leader to team member and the team leader empowering behavior. The conclusions of this study promote the combination of Chinese cultural background and Western authorization theory. This study also contributes to have an in-depth understanding of the motivation behind team leader empowering behavior, which can lay the theoretical foundation for further study about the antecedents of team leader empowering behavior.Second, this study firstly investigates the precondition about playing efficacy of team leader empowering behavior from the perspective of team’s characteristic, which expands the research ideas about team leader empowering behavior. We examine the relationship between team leader empowering behavior and team performance, and investigate the moderating role of the team proactive personality in this relationship. The study results show:the team leader empowering behavior has a significant positive impact on team performance, and team proactive personality plays a positive moderating role in this process.Third, basing on social exchanged theory and cognitive evaluation theory, we investigate the mediating role of team psychological empowerment in the influencing mechanism of team leader empowering behavior on team performance. The research conclusions effectively improve and expand the influencing mechanism of team leader empowering behavior on team performance. The study results show:team psychological empowerment plays a locally mediating role in the reciprocal influence from team leader empowering behavior and team proactive personality to team performance. Specifically, the team leader empowering behavior firstly positive impact the team psychological empowerment, and the promote the team performance, and the team proactive personality has a positive influence on team performance through the positive moderating role in the relationship between team leader empowering behavior and team psychological empowerment. The study results can provide practical enlightenment for managing knowledge-based team.In the knowledge economy, relevant topics about team leader empowering behavior have became interesting and hot issues, and this study only make a preliminarily empirical research about the antecedents of the team leader empowering behavior and it’s influencing mechanism on team performance of knowledge-based team under Chinese cultural background. In future study, we will continuously enrich this topic combing with the development of relevant theories and the actual situations of enterprises at home and abroad.