Research On The Influence Of Informal Leadership Emergence In Project Teams Based On Emotion And Comparative Perspective

As the scale of infrastructure construction expands and investment accelerates,engineering projects are characteri zed by temporary,dynamic and complex nature,and project teams responsible for engineering design and production construction are not only constrained by the objectives of schedule,quality and cost,but also need to control the implementation of a series of pr ocesses.At the same time,they are faced with natural environmental changes,cooperation conflicts and other situations,which require teams to have and develop resilience to cope with and uncertainty needs to be addressed and resolved.Formal leadership from the project team,such as the project manager’s commanding and transactional leadership style,can effectively drive the implementation of the project,but formal leadership alone is still insufficient,and informal leadership needs to emerge from tea m members to stimulate team dynamics and increase individual participation with good interpersonal interaction to better achieve project goals.Moreover,informal leadership from team members can lead to ostracism and envy from other team members,which in turn can hinder the progress of the project.While the positive effects of informal leadership have received much academic attention,the potential negative effects of informal leadership have not been explored.Based on this,this paper explores the poss ible ‘ double-edged sword’interpersonal effects of the emergence of informal leadership in project teams from a bystander’s perspective,and constructs and validates a ‘double-edged sword’ model of the emergence of informal leadership in project teams on t eam members’ work attitudes and behaviors.Based on Affective Event Theory and Social Comparison Theory,this paper explores the influence of the emergence of informal leadership on the learning and ostracism behaviors of team members in project teams by constructing a dual mediating model that uses benign envy as a facilitative mechanism and malicious envy as a disincentive mechanism,and includes the situational feature of team distributi ve justice as a moderating variable.Results based on one experimen tal study(100 valid employee data)and one time-lagged field studies(valid data for 399 members of 63 project teams)lend support to our propositions through two-factor ANOVA,multiple linear regression and Bootstrap test methods with the help of SPSS an d MPLUS software.Firstly,the findings indicate that the project informal leadership emergence is positively related to the team members’ learning behavior,and the project informal leadership emergence is not significantly related to the team members’ malicious envy.Secondly,team members’ envy(e.g.,benign envy and malicious envy)mediates the relationship between project informal leadership emergence and team members’ behaviors(e.g.,learning behavior and ostracism).Thirdly,team distributive justic e moderates the positive relationship between the project informal leadership emergence and team members’ benign envy;and team distributive justice moderates the negative relationship between the project informal leadership emergence and team members’ malicious envy.Finally,team distributive justice facilitated the indirect pathway between the emergence of informal leadership in project teams,team members’ benign envy and learning behavior,and inhibited the indirect pathway between the emergence of informal leadership in project teams,team members’ malicious envy and ostracism.This study not only broadens the application of Affective Event Theory and Social Comparison Theory to construction and temporary projects,but also provides a dialectical and balanced understanding of the existence of the ’double-edged sword’effect and the emotional impact of the emergence of informal leadership in project teams.This will lead to recommendations on the motivation of informal team leadership and the management of team members’ emotions,providing a basis and new ideas for project teams to improve project performance and achieve team goals.