Research On The Influencing Mechanism Of Leader Human Capital And Social Capital On Team Performance And Employee Performance

In the study of management,the influence of resources on performance has always been the interests of researchers.Existing research shows that resources are a double-edged sword: some resources improve performance,while some resources may reduce performance.Therefore,the research on the effect of resource on performance is mainly focus on exploring its mechanism and boundary conditions.Over the past three decades,academic understanding of performance has become increasingly accurate which was indicated by the increase of involving different levels of performance(Chen,2016).On the one hand,team performance is formed after the integration of individual performance,and team performance is re-integrated to form organizational performance,which ultimately brings success to the organization;on the other hand,organizational success reflects team achievement,while team achievement reflects employee success,and employee success then reflects employee performance.As an output of the organization,employee performance is the key source of organizational performance,and also an important indicator to measure the effectiveness of leadership.Therefore,it has attracted the long-term attention of scholars and business managers.For the study of employee performance,scholars put forward different models of individual characteristics from different perspectives,which mostly explore the factors affecting their own performance from the individual level of employees,while not from the team level.A few of them discussed Organizational Environmental factors,such as the individual and environmental employee performance model proposed by Cardy & Dobbins(1994).But they did not carry out empirical testing.With the deepening of research,the influencing factors model of employee performance will inevitably present a cross-level research trend(Zhang,2013).In this context,this study tries to explore the influencing factors and mechanisms of employee performance from the team level.Teams has become an important unit when firms attempt to accomplish complex tasks and cope with unpredictable changes in internal and external environment in the era of knowledge economy(Cohen & Bailey,1997).Many organizations improve their performance by delegating more responsibilities to teams and effectively designing and managing them(Katzenbach & Smith,1993;Wang,2008).However,team does not always produce synergy effect.In the practice of enterprises,there is often a phenomenon that the team with high-quality resources has poor performance.Under this background,the research on the influencing factors and influencing mechanism of team performance has become the focus of scholars in the East and the West(Liu,2011).Therefore,to identify the influencing factors of team performance and explore the internal mechanisms of the influence have become an important issue in this study.This study synthetically considers employee performance and team performance,integrates the influencing factors of performance at employee level and team level,and constructs a cross-level model.Through reviewing the relevant studies,we find that resources,especially the resources of team leaders,have an important impact on staff and team performance.Bass(1985),and Keller(1992)believes that the style of leadership plays a significant role in improving individual performance.Besides,leadership is one of the key competencies for any successful organization(Bennis & Nanus,1985).For example,Schaubroeck et al.,(2007)and Kearney et al.,(2009)focused on the transformational leadership at the team level.Srivastava et al.(2006)explored the impact of empowered leadership on team performance.Therefore,this study tries to explore the impact of team-level human capital and social capital on employee and team performance from the perspective of resources.Based on the theory of resource preservation,this study constructs a multi-level model,aiming to deeply explore the role of leader human capital and social capital,and to further reveal the different influence mechanism of team-level leader human capital and social capital on team and employee performance.In addition,in the era of knowledge economy,team is the basic unit of work,which means that appropriate team structure must be chosen to achieve organizational goals.Therefore,this study examines the effect of team structure on the relationships between team-level leader’s human and social capital,and employee and team performance from the perspective of organizational context.Specifically,the main contents of the study include the following aspects.First,based on the theory of resource preservation,this paper explores the positive impact of leader human capital and social capital on team performance and employee performance.Second,based on resource preservation theory and work engagement model,this paper explores how leader human and social capital affect team and employee performance.Namely,leaders’ human and social capital promote team performance through team knowledge integration ability at the team level.While leaders’ human and social capital promote employee performance through work engagement at the individual level.Third,the moderating effect of team structure on the relationship between Leaders’ human and social capital,and team and employee performance is explored.In terms of research methods,this study first systematically analyses the relevant literature,identifies the definitions and selects the measurement scales of variables in the conceptual model.Subsequently,this study takes the independent working teams of 20 enterprises in China as the research sample.A questionnaire survey is used to collect the multi-source data of small sample pre-survey and formal samples.In the formal sample collection process,168 effective work teams were obtained,including 168 team leaders and 749 team members.In this study,SPSS22.0 and HLM6.08 statistical software were used to test the reliability of the formal scale.The discrimination validity test,common method bias test were carried out for each variable which evaluated by team member.In addition,data aggregation test of team knowledge integration ability and team structure were carried out.Variance and correlation analysis of demographic characteristic variables were also carried out.Furthermore,this study uses HLM6.08 statistical software to test the team-level leader’s human capital and social capital on team-level team performance and individual-level employee performance,and uses Monte Carlo method to test the cross-level mediation effect.Based on the results of empirical analysis,this paper draws the following conclusions:(1)Leader’s human capital and social capital have a significant positive impact on team performance.(2)The intermediary role of team knowledge integration ability between leader’s human and social capital and team performance is established.(3)The intermediary role of work engagement between leader’s human and social capital and employee performance is established.(4)Team structure has a significant moderating effect between leader’s human and social capital and team’s knowledge integration ability.Team structure has a significant cross-level moderating effect on the relationship between leader’s human and social capital and employee’s performance.Leaders’ human and social capital have a stronger positive impact on team knowledge integration ability and work engagement.The theoretical significance of this study lies in the following aspects.This paper(1)expands the research level of human capital and social capital;(2)enriches the application of resource preservation theory;(3)and reveals the boundary conditions for the role of leaders’ human and social capital.In terms of the significance of practice,this paper(1)discusses the influence of team leaders’ human capital and social capital on team performance and employee performance from the perspective of resources,which provides empirical support and theoretical basis for enterprise performance management;(2)helps leaders to carry out effective team management through the integration of the research of team and employee performance;(3)promotes to change the organizational structure,helps to choose the appropriate team structure,and provides support for enhancing the influence of leader resources on team knowledge integration ability and employee engagement.The innovations of this study are as follows:First,this paper explores the impact of leader’s human capital and social capital on employee performance and team performance,and provides a new theoretical perspective for performance research.From relevant literature of human capital and social capital,the existing research mainly focuses on the implementation effect of individual-level leaders’ human and social capital on organizations and employees respectively.In addition,the research mainly focuses on the same level of individuals or organizations,lacking considering the influence of team level and cross-level.Cross-level research can help to more systematically and comprehensively understand the mechanism of human and social capital of leaders.Therefore,this study contributes by exploring the cross-level effects of leader human capital and social capital on different levels of performance,in order to explain how team-level leader human capital and social capital affect team performance and individual-level employee performance.Second,on the basis of resource preservation theory,this paper reveals the internal mechanism of the effect of leaders’ human capital and social capital on team performance and employee performance from the individual and team levels.In this study,we propose a two-way intermediary mechanism for the relationship between resources and performance.From the perspective of resource preservation theory,we explain how leaders motivate each employee and the whole team at the same time.What are the paths of incentives? The study explains the impact of leader human capital and social capital on team performance and employee performance more systematically through identifying intermediary variables.In this study,the relationship between leader human capital and social capital and team performance is studied.Based on the theory of resource preservation,team knowledge integration ability is included as a mediating variable.In the cross-level relationship between leader human capital and social resources and employee performance,the mediating role of employee work engagement is introduced.Therefore,empirical research is carried out to enrich the research on the mechanism of performance formation at different levels in an organization.Third,the boundary conditions of the role of leaders’ human capital and social capital are analyzed.It reveals that team structure will act as moderating factors when exploring the role of leader’s capital.Previous studies have mostly affirmed the positive impact of human capital and social capital at the individual level on individual performance and organizational performance,as well as the impact of entrepreneurs’ human capital and social capital at the organizational level on organizational performance.However,there are still some deficiencies in discussing the important theoretical issues of how and under what conditions leaders’ capital can effectively improve their performance.What types of resources promote knowledge integration,and in which scenarios are teams better or worse at integrating knowledge? In the era of knowledge economy,team is the basic unit of work,and work engagement also takes place in the context of team,which means that the team or individual must choose the appropriate team structure environment to achieve organizational goals.In view of this,this study examines the cross-level effects of leader human capital and social capital on team performance and employee performance from the perspective of team structure.In short,the organic team structure provides an organizational context promoting team-level knowledge integration ability and individual-level work engagement effectiveness.Therefore,this study further clarifies the effectiveness of leaders’ human capital and social capital in organizational context.