| Under the background of transitional economy,organizations complete the complex tasks in team work to increase flexibility and to cope with the complex economic environment.At the same time,along with the increasingly fierce competition,unstable and uncertain factors like organizations merger,restructuring,job cut are increasing.Uncertainty faced by team members today is more serious and work pressure gets heavier.To achieve the goals better,team members form a team to meet the needs of tasks.People join and leave the group,which blurs the team boundary.In this situation,therefore,the key to obtain competitive advantage and to achieve long-term development is that the whole team should improve the engagement effectively.But in reality,the low level of employee engagement continues to create challenges for organizations.According to the latest survey of Gallup and Ipsos,two authoritative consulting companies in the world,only 13%of Employees worldwide were actually engaged at work,and only 10%of Employees in China were engaged at work in 2016.Though employee engagement increases in China,but still very low.Therefore,combining with the reality of our country,the discussion of team engagement improvement under the uncertain situations has extremely important practical significance.Based on the research of individual engagement,researchers put forward the concept of team engagement.From the view of composition,team engagement is a shared perception construct related to work and characterized by team vigor,team dedication and team absorption,which requires team members to develop mutual focus of attention on the work and to express shared emotion.This kind of shared perception needs to pay attention to the influence of the process of interpersonal interaction.From the view of formation process,team engagement is an emerging state,which is based on individual engagement,but not the simple sum of the individual engagement.Team engagement is the results of individuals’engagement under a team situation,and will be affected by team factors and individual factors at the same time.Therefore,combining the composition and the formation process,focusing on individual and team level factors’ influence,and interpersonal interaction in contributing to team members’ mutual focus of attention and shared emotion are the key to analysis the formation of team engagement.Most of existing team engagement research took stable teams as the research object to analysis of the forming process of team engagement,and made the default assumption that members have mutual focus of attention about the same task,which would be ignoring the important component of team engagement.From the level of analysis,few researches integrate multilevel studies,therefore team engagement is still worth further discussing from the perspective of multilevel.Firstly,the existing team engagement promotion strategy such as social identity and IMOI(input-mediator-output-input)analysis framework,put forward that when the team members maintain high identity,and effectively control inputs and process,team can keep a high level of engagement.These strategies’ default premise is that team members keep the mutual focus of attention on each others’ work in a stable situation.However,new situation can blur boundary of teams,such as team members may belong to several teams at the same time or build a team in the need of tasks.These researches discussed less about the formation of mutual focus of attention which is the important part of team engagement.Secondly,according to the forming process analysis,the existing research results most considered the formation process separately in individual level or team level,but few studies integrated multilevel research and analysed the impact of interpersonal interaction process.This study suggests that under the situation of uncertainty,team engagement lies in how to promote and maintain the mutual focus of attention in the process of interpersonal interaction,and takes the individual level,team level factors into consideration.Based on these analyses,this study will focus on two research questions:(1)How team level factors affect team engagement and individual engagement through effective interpersonal interaction?(2)How individual level factor—personal engagement contributes to the bottom-up process of team engagement emergence through effective interpersonal interaction process?This study consists of three parts.To answer the first question,this study conducts study 1.To answer the second question,this study carries out the study 2 and 3.Study 1:Using questionnaire survey method to collect 63 teams’data in two time points and from two different types of raters to investigate the effect of goal focused leadership,advice network density,friendship network density on team and individual engagement.The results show that the goal focused leadership influences team engagement positively.Advice network density mediates the relationship between goal focused leadership and team engagement,friendship network density’s mediation effect is not significant.At the same time,goal focused leadership has a positive impact on individual engagement,but both advice network density and friendship network density’s mediations between the goal focused leadership and individual engagement are not significant.Study 2:Basing on the results of study 1 that advice network density mediates the relationship between goal focused leadership and team engagement,this study empirically tests the engagement transmission mechanism between individuals.By finding out the center member at the advice network,this study analyzes its effect on other team members’engagement,therefore contributes to the appearance of more engaged individuals in a team,and provides the basis for the emergence of team engagement.The results show that the member in the advice network center has an effect on other team member,and relational energy is a mediation factor of this relation.At the same time,this study empirically tests the interaction effect of team task interdependence and relational energy on employee engagement with the HLM analysis method,and the result is significance.Study 3:Basing on the results of study 2 that more engaged individuals appear in a team,this study explores the button-up dynamic process of team engagement emergence by using case study method.The results show that social interaction is more prevalent in a dynamic situation,in spite of task interaction and social interaction are two major interactions.Several high engaged individuals strengthen four interaction elements through strong ties in the process of task interactions.Mutual focus of attentions and shared emotions form circuit.Thus more meaningful interactions through constant reinforcement contribute to the emergence of team engagement.The results contribute to the literature of team engagement.In addition,the findings provide important implications for people on how to improve the team engagement. |
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