Narcissism and Empowerment: How Narcissism Influences the Trickle-Down Effects of Organizational Empowerment Climate on Performance

The present study proposes a trickle-down model of employee empowerment in which empowerment climate at the organization level is positively related to the empowering leadership of team leaders and ultimately to individual task performance. Importantly, we hypothesize that team leaders’ and members’ narcissism can respectively inhibit and enable the cross-level empowerment process by affecting the intended distribution of decision-making authority and resources between team leaders and members. The analysis of data from 834 team members of 189 teams in 46 organizations reveals that organizational empowerment climate is positively related to team leaders’ empowering leadership when they are less narcissistic. Empowering leadership is positively related to individual task performance when team members are highly narcissistic. Finally, we observe that the combination of less narcissistic leaders and more narcissistic members is a condition under which the indirect effect of organizational empowerment climate on individual task performance through empowering leadership is positive.     

知识工作团队中组织公民行为的作用机制实证研究

组织公民行为是员工做出的超越基本工作职责要求的积极主动合作行为,这类行为在整体上有利于组织的有效运作。本研究以12家高科技组织中的50个知识工作团队作为研究对象,探讨团队成员整体上表现出的组织公民行为对团队绩效的影响作用机制。研究结果表明,团队整体水平的组织公民行为对团队绩效具有积极的影响作用,并且群体效能感在组织公民行为对团队绩效产生影响时起到中介作用。     

Linking employee boundary spanning behavior to task performance: the influence of informal leader emergence and group power distance

Driven by fierce global competition, flatter organizational structures and the growing complexity of tasks, boundary spanning behavior (BSB) in externally dependent work teams has increasingly been emphasized in both theory and practice. The current study aims to answer the questions of whether, when and how an individual’s BSB impacts his or her task performance within a team. Based on a sample of 272 employees from 57 new product development teams in China, we found that informal leader emergence mediated the relationship between an individual’s BSB and his or her performance within a team. Moreover, group-level power distance positively moderated the association between BSB and informal leader emergence. An overall mediated moderation model of the effect of the interaction between BSB and group power distance (PD) on task performance via informal leadership emergence was also confirmed. In particular, the relationship between BSB and task performance via informal leadership emergence was stronger for teams with less PD than for those with more PD. The implications of the research are discussed.     

Enabling Shared Leadership in Virtual Project Teams: A Practitioners' Guide

Many virtual project teams perform better when leadership is shared (rather than centralized with the formal team leader); however, team leaders are often neither prepared to identify shared leadership potential nor to actually share leadership responsibility. Based on a study of 96 globally dispersed software development teams we show that team leaders tend to underestimate the team members’ capacity to lead themselves. As a consequence, these leaders monopolize decision‐making authority and provide insufficient levels of autonomy for team members to tackle their tasks. Preventing the team members from unfolding their true potential, these leaders unconsciously jeopardize virtual team performance. Paradoxically, it is thus team leaders themselves hindering leadership effectiveness in virtual teams.     

When does shared leadership matter in entrepreneurial teams: the role of personality composition

Although prior research has investigated a number of conditions under which shared leadership in teams may improve team performance, team composition variables have been left unexplored. Using a sample of 144 teams in a technology incubator in China, this study explored the moderating effects of personality diversity on the relationship between shared leadership and entrepreneurial team performance. Results indicate that shared leadership improves entrepreneurial team performance; the strength of the relationship, however, depends on the level of team personality diversity. More specifically, when relationship-oriented personality diversity is high, the shared leadership—team performance relationship is stronger. These findings advance research in entrepreneurship, groups and teams, and shared leadership, and provide practical implications as well.     

Linking Transformational Leadership and Team Performance: A Conflict Management Approach

This study develops a model in which transformational leadership affects team coordination and performance through the conflict management approaches adopted by team members. Data were collected from three different sources in a lagged design from 108 teams in a large enterprise in China. Results support the reasoning that transformational leadership promotes team coordination and thereby team performance by encouraging teams to adopt a cooperative, as opposed to competitive, approach to conflict management. These results suggest that transformational leadership may help team members manage conflicts for their mutual benefit. This is an important mechanism through which transformational leadership enhances team coordination and, in turn, achieves higher team performance.     

组织公民行为对团队有效性影响研究述评

组织公民行为被认为是工作团队或组织有效运行的重要因素。本文从群体（团队）层面探讨了组织公民行为对团队有效性的影响作用。简要回顾了组织公民行为的概念及其起源;在此基础上详细探讨了组织公民行为与团队有效性之间的关系;提出未来该领域中值得研究的方向。     

Collective Dynamics of Citizenship Behaviour: What Group Characteristics Promote Group‐Level Helping?

A basic tenet of research on organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB) is that OCB aggregated across individuals improves organizational performance. Departing from the typical focus on individual-level OCB, the construct of group-level OCB (GOCB) recently emerged as a critical group function that affects various group effectiveness measures. Despite the clear link between GOCB and team performance, the existing literature provides a limited understanding with regard to the antecedents of GOCB, mostly focusing on leadership variables. Establishing helping behaviour (a core dimension of OCB) as a collective construct, this study substantially expands the antecedents of group-level helping, and empirically tests their effects using three different operationalizations of group-level helping. The results, based on a sample of 96 work units, show that membership diversity in gender and education decreased group-level helping, whereas diversity in tenure increased it. Group-level helping was also positively related to leadership characteristics (supportive unit manager, transformational top management) and perceived competence of unit members. In addition, the analysis further indicated that perceived competence is a positive predictor of group-level helping only when the unit members also believe that others are trustworthy in terms of integrity and benevolent motivation. From a methodological standpoint, the study provides important insights by comparing different ways of operationalizing collective constructs.     

Task and person-focused leadership behaviors and team performance: A meta-analysis

This paper reports the results of a meta-analytic review of the relationship between person and task-focused leader behaviors, on the one hand, and team performance, on the other hand. The results, based on 89 independent samples, show a moderate positive (ρ = 0.33) association between both types of leadership behaviors and subjective team performance. For objective team performance, the effect sizes are smaller, yet positive (ρ = 0.19 for task-focused leadership behaviors and ρ = 0.18 for person-focused leadership behaviors). Furthermore, with respect to the methodological moderators, the analyses show that the relationships were stronger when leadership behaviors were rated by the leaders themselves, rather than by others, and the association was stronger when the correlations were estimated at the individual level, as opposed to the team level of analysis. Concerning conceptual moderators, team type was identified as a significant moderator, and correlations between a person-focused leadership behavior and team performance were stronger for service and project teams than for action/performing teams. Task interdependence was another moderator tested in our meta-analysis, yet our results show no clear moderating effect of task interdependence on the relationship between leadership behavior and team performance.     

Inter‐Team Coordination Patterns and Outcomes in Multi‐Team Projects

We examine what kinds of patterns of mechanisms can be applied in the coordination of several inter‐related project teams. We identify three distinct coordination schemes; namely: centralized coordination, decentralized coordination, and balanced coordination. In addition, we compare individuals' perceptions on communication, coordination effectiveness, project efficiency, learning, task analyzability, and task uncertainty between the three identified coordination schemes. The results of our study extend to both theoretical and practical understanding of coordination in multi‐team projects and its relation to communication, coordination effectiveness, project performance, and learning.     

Leadership in virtual teams: A multilevel perspective

Understanding leadership functioning in virtual teams becomes critical as organizations increasingly use dispersed teams for talent acquisition. In the current article I present a preliminary model that explicates how task- and relationship-oriented leader behaviors influence team and individual processes and outcomes in virtual teams. Further, I discuss cross-level relationships between virtual team and individual processes, as well as the boundary effects of contextual factors (i.e., task complexity, task interdependence, and virtuality) in virtual leadership functioning.     

Team personality composition,emergent leadership and shared leadership in virtual teams: A theoretical framework

Limited theory and research has been devoted to the role of team personality composition, as well as emergent and shared leadership, in virtual teams. In an effort to provide a theoretical basis for the role of team personality composition, as well as emergent and shared leadership, in virtual teams, we propose a virtual team framework that portrays the team personality composition as predictors of emergent and shared leadership. These in turn are expected to impact virtual team performance. We further posit that the relationships between team personality composition and virtual team performance are indirect, through emergent leadership and shared leadership. Finally, we present team virtuality as a moderator between team composition and team processes. Suggestions for future research and implications for the management of virtual teams are presented.     

Socio‐demographic factors and shared leadership behaviors in dispersed teams: Implications for human resource management

Companies increasingly make use of geographically dispersed teams to capture knowledge residing at different locations. In this context, shared leadership is considered a key enabler of team performance. Taking a functional perspective on shared leadership, we thus investigate the relationship between shared leadership behaviors and team performance in dispersed teams. Furthermore, we analyze how socio‐demographic factors that are characteristic for dispersed teams (i.e., high female‐to‐male ratio, high mean age, and high levels of national diversity) affect shared leadership behaviors. Based on data from 96 dispersed teams, we show that shared leadership behavior fosters team performance. Further, we find the socio‐demographic characteristics typical for dispersed teams to foster shared leadership. Theoretical and managerial implications for human resource management are discussed. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

The impact of implicit collective leadership theories on the emergence and effectiveness of leadership networks in teams

Leadership in today's high-performing teams is a relational process best understood from a multilevel emergent perspective. Implicit theories of leadership and followership play an important role in predicting leader emergence in more traditional hierarchical structures, but are inadequate for understanding and predicting leadership as networks in teams, as they do not consider the complex dynamics of leading and following activities inherent in such structures. To address this theoretical gap, we propose the concept of Implicit Leadership Network Theories (ILNTs) that integrates implicit leadership and followership theories with contemporary social network perspectives of leadership in teams to predict the shape and structure of leadership network emergence and subsequent team outcomes. More specifically, we propose that the combination of team member self-ILNTs (i.e., expectations regarding one's own role within a leadership network) and network-ILNTs (i.e., expectations regarding the prototypical team leadership structure) will shape the emergence and effectiveness of leadership in teams. We describe several prototypical team configurations of ILNTs and discuss implications for future research and human resource management.     

Heterogeneity and centrality of “dark personality” within teams,shared leadership,and team performance: A conceptual moderated-mediation model

Shifting from the much-studied five-factor model of personality, this paper focuses on dark personality (i.e. the “Dark Triad”: Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and narcissism) to advance understanding of team composition, processes, and performance. The research responds to a call to explore dark personality's manifestation within – and impact on – teams. Specifically, this paper will examine the impact of within-team heterogeneity in dark personality on team performance, with shared leadership as mediator of this relationship. Additionally, I propose two moderators of the relationship between within-team dark triad heterogeneity and shared leadership – team network centrality of the team member scoring highest on the Dark Triad, and team mean Dark Triad score. This research aims to make a uniquely valuable contribution to scholarship on leadership within teams through bridging literatures on social network analysis, teams, leadership, and the dark triad and should have implications for team selection and performance.     

Conflict Management for Effective Top Management Teams and Innovation in China*

abstract Top management teams may be critical for developing organizations that can keep abreast of marketplace changes and innovate. Several streams of strategy research have argued that conflict and diversity promote top management team effectiveness. This study proposes that how top management teams manage conflict can greatly contribute to their effective leadership of organizational innovation. A total of 378 executives from 105 organizations in China completed measures of conflict management (cooperative, competitive, and avoiding) and productive conflict (an outcome of conflict). Separately, 105 CEOs from these firms indicated their team's effectiveness and their organization's innovativeness. Results support the theory that conflict management can contribute to making top management teams effective. Structural equation analysis suggests that cooperative conflict management promotes productive conflict and top management team effectiveness that in turn result in organizational innovation. These results, coupled with previous research, were interpreted as suggesting that cooperative conflict management is an important contributor to effective top management teams even in the collectivist culture of China.     

Senior Team Attributes and Organizational Ambidexterity: The Moderating Role of Transformational Leadership

abstract    Organizations capable of pursuing exploration and exploitation simultaneously have been suggested to obtain superior performance. Combining both types of activities and achieving organizational ambidexterity, however, leads to the presence of multiple and often conflicting goals, and poses considerable challenges to senior teams in ambidextrous organizations. This study explores the role of senior team attributes and leadership behaviour in reconciling conflicting interests among senior team members and achieving organizational ambidexterity. Findings indicate that a senior team shared vision and contingency rewards are associated with a firm's ability to combine high levels of exploratory and exploitative innovations. In addition, our study shows that an executive director's transformational leadership increases the effectiveness of senior team attributes in ambidextrous organizations and moderates the effectiveness of senior team social integration and contingency rewards. Hence, our study clarifies how senior executives reconcile conflicting demands and facilitate the balancing of seemingly contradictory forces in ambidextrous organizations. Implications for literatures on senior team attributes, transformational leadership and organizational ambidexterity are discussed.     

Sink or Swim: Empowering Leadership and Overload in Teams' Ability to Deal with the Unexpected

The notion of improvisation has recently emerged in managerial studies as a viable solution to flexibly dealing with unexpected occurrences in work environments. However, past research on team improvisation has overlooked the contingencies that allow teams to effectively improvise. Drawing upon demand‐control theory, we investigate how empowering leadership and overload affect the improvisation‐performance relationship in the context of 48 work teams. Our results suggest that empowering leadership positively moderates the relationship between improvisation and performance, while overload attenuates the same relationship. Moreover, we found a joint effect of overload and empowering leadership influencing the improvisation‐performance link, such that improvisation is most positively related to performance when empowering leadership is high and overload is low. Conversely, we found that empowering leadership is particularly detrimental to the improvisation‐performance relationship when team members perceive high degrees of overload. Our findings make important contributions to the extant team literature as well as to the emerging literature on team improvisation. We outline several significant insights for HR managers and team leaders who are responsible for supporting teams that face unexpected events in the work environment. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Emotional exhaustion and job performance: the mediating role of organizational commitment

We analyze the impact of emotional exhaustion (EE) on turnover intention, task performance and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) among hospital nurses in China. The differential mediating effects of affective organizational commitment on the associations between EE and turnover intention, task performance and OCB were examined. Data were collected from both nurses and their supervising physicians using a questionnaire survey in Mandarin. The results revealed full mediation effect for turnover intention and for OCB directed at the organization. There was a significant indirect effect for OCB directed at individuals and no mediation effect for task performance.     

IT-enabled awareness and self-directed leadership behaviors in virtual teams

Despite the pervasiveness of self-managing virtual teams, organizations find it particularly challenging to motivate virtual team members to exhibit and manage their leadership behaviors. This study contributes to virtual team leadership literature by specifically shedding light on how distinct awareness forms enabled by information technology (IT) signal important cues to virtual team members to self-lead, that is, self-direct their leadership behavior in their team. Our results reveal that IT-enabled disclosure awareness is key to inducing several leadership behaviors: directive leadership, supportive leadership and interpersonal helping. Further, for directive leadership and interpersonal helping, the relationship is contingent on IT-enabled task knowledge and IT-enabled presence awareness. At low IT-enabled task knowledge awareness or high IT-enabled presence awareness, virtual team members who perceived IT-enabled disclosure awareness employed directive leadership and interpersonal helping. Opposite results were found at high perceived IT-enabled task knowledge awareness and low perceived IT-enabled presence awareness. This research highlights the critical role played by specific awareness forms enabled by IT in motivating virtual team members to engage in self-leadership.