| In today's knowledge-based economy, firms must continually develop innovative products to cope with fierce competition, and maintain strategic flexibility. It is self-evident that innovation is essential for firms operating in the 21st century to stabilize desirable market sharing and sustain competitive advantage. Given that the macro-level innovation is a process by which firms successfully utilize and implement creative ideas derived from micro-level employees, creativity is the prerequisite of firm innovation.In order to cultivate employees' creativity, firms increasingly structure job as team-based arrangement. It is obvious that team is the basic component in today's workplace. The most fascinating element of team work lies in two factors. First, team work provides a platform for team members to absorb new ideas, engage each others in elaborating diverse information, and finally come up with some creative solutions to existing problems. Second, team work also enables the bedrock for team members to further polish their creative ideas, and provides socio-emotional support for employees to implement them, and finally turn them into business value for the firm.In recognition of the various benefits of teamwork, every firm urges to know how to increase the team effectiveness and cultivate team creativity. Among the plenty of factors being proposed, team leaders are among the most proximal and important context team members encounter every single working day. So it is undoubtedly team leaders play a fundamental role in facilitating team collective information elaboration and cultivating team creativity.Current leadership scholarship is largely silent about team-level phenomena and challenges that team leaders face. Recently, leadership scholars directly address the level-of-analysis issues. Along this line, transformational leadership scholars already made some awesome achievements. Researchers separated the overarching transformational leadership into two components: group-focused transformational leadership, by which the influence foci is the team as a whole; differentiated individual-focused transformational leadership, by which the influence foci is the individual team members. Several follow-up researches already demonstrated its construct validity, and labeled this new operationalization approach of transformational leadership as dual-level model of transformational leadership. So it is rigor to follow this line of research. Besides, China is defined as a Guanxi-oriented society. Chinese people distinguish their interaction objects into three general categories-strangers, acquaintances, family members, and then interact differently with people from different categories according to respective social exchange principles. So Chinese society is recognized as "Cha Xu Ge Ju". Naturally, in the workplace, team leaders will demonstrate differentiated leadership behaviors to their followers. So the dual-level model of transformational leadership is a relevant research topic given the above arguments.For a long time, Chinese research community is plagued by how to make a effective linkage between context and Chinese management research. Scholars split themselves into two groups. One is dedicated to develop "theory of Chinese management", they always adopt etic approach to test existing western theory in Chinese context. Another is dedicated to develop "Chinese theory of management",they always adopt emic approach to build high contextualizing original theory.Scholars have already reached a consensus that both approaches have significant contributions to the healthy development of Chinese management research community. Due to current institutional environment of academy, the prior road is well traveled and also generated substantial insights about Chinese management phenomenon. However, to build really influential Chinese management theory, it is necessary for more researches to follow the latter road. It also requires huge academic responsibility and "sense of ownership" for every researcher dedicated to contributing knowledge following indigenous research approach.This dissertation tries to seek a balance between these two approaches by designing three studies integrating both emic and etic approaches. This dissertation focuses on the dual-level model of transformational leadership and team and individual effectiveness. Study one and two adopted a context-free approach to develop two model link dual-level transformational leadership and team creativity/individual voice behavior. Study three adopted a context-sensitive approach to develop a moderated mediation view of dual-level transformational leadership and team information elaboration while taking Chinese middle way thinking into account.Specifically:Based on group social capital theory, study one builded a causal chain model linking dual-level transformational leadership, team social capital, team knowledge sharing, and eventually team creativity. Results derived from 225 groups nested within 64 Jiangsu-based high-tech firms confirmed that group-focused transformational leadership is positively related to team communication network density, which is in turn related positively to team knowledge sharing; differentiated individual-focused transformational leadership is positively related to team member communication network density divergence, which is in turn related negatively to team knowledge sharing, and team knowledge sharing is eventually conductive of team creativity.Based on the "management of meaning" perspective of leadership, study two investigated the relationship between dual-level transformational leadership and voice,mediated by goal clarity perception. Results derived from 365 team members nested within 65 work teams revealed that group-focused transformational leadership is positively related to team member's goal clarity, while differentiated individual-focused transformational leadership related negatively to team member's goal clarity. Furthermore, role clarity is positively related to voice behavior. In sum,role clarity partially mediated the cross-level relationship between dual-level transformational leadership and individual voice behavior.Study three used a relational perspective to develop a moderated mediation model linking dual-level transformational leadership to within-team information elaboration. Data from 100 work teams in 32 Chinese high-technology firms were collected. Results suggested group-focused transformational leadership increased information elaboration in teams, while differentiated individual-focused transformational leadership decreased information elaboration in teams. Within-team conflict mediated those effects. Furthermore, team-level middle way thinking as a specific Chinese cultural value orientation moderated the two lines of indirect effects.In sum, this dissertation focuses on the dual-level model of transformational leadership and its associations with critical team(team creativity/information elaboration) and individual outcomes(voice) in three separate studies, so as to achieve balance between emic and etic approaches. This dissertation makes significant theoretical and practical contribution to various research areas such as team leadership,group social capital, team knowledge management, team creativity, voice and contextualization research among others. At the end, I discussed research limitations of these three studies and then proposed some exciting future research directions. |
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