Job crafting mediates how empowering leadership and employees’ core self-evaluations predict favourable and unfavourable outcomes

ABSTRACT

Based on job crafting theory and workplace resources theories, the present study develops a model of both antecedents and consequences of job crafting. We hypothesized subordinates’ perceptions of empowering leadership and core self-evaluations influence employee job crafting behaviours, which subsequently influence four outcomes: improving three employee well-being outcomes, (a) work-family enrichment, (b) flourishing, and (c) life satisfaction; and simultaneously reducing the organizational outcome of (d) deviant behaviours. Three-waves of data over nine months were collected from U.S. full-time employees (n = 276). Results showed empowering leadership and core self-evaluations positively related to expansive/approach forms of job crafting behaviours, which in turn related to the three different well-being outcomes. However, job crafting did not affect employee deviant behaviour. Instead, empowering leadership and core self-evaluations directly predicted less deviant behaviour. With the imputed data, we also found job crafting had a significant but weak relationship with deviant behaviour. These findings provide an integrated understanding of how and why employees engage in job crafting, and the important influence that job crafting has on employees’ subjective well-being. The present study advances leadership and job crafting theories, providing practical recommendations for promoting employee well-being and decreasing undesirable behaviours in the form of workplace deviance.     

绿色变革型领导对团队绿色行为的影响： 基于社会认知视角的本土探索

随着环境问题日益严峻,如何鼓励和引导组织中的绿色行为已逐渐成为领导者的使命。本研究检验了绿色变革型领导对团队绿色行为的影响,并从社会认知的视角探索团队绿色自我效能的中介作用和集体主义气氛的调节作用。对104份团队数据进行回归分析,结果发现：绿色变革型领导与团队绿色行为呈正相关,团队绿色自我效能在上述过程中起着部分中介作用;集体主义气氛正向调节了团队绿色自我效能与团队绿色行为的直接关系,以及绿色变革型领导与团队绿色行为之间经由团队绿色自我效能的间接效应。本研究的结果能为如何管理团队绿色行为提供启发。     

The Performance of Pre‐Founding Entrepreneurial Teams: The Importance of Learning and Leadership

Entrepreneurial teams often struggle with simultaneous task and team challenges at an early stage of new venture creation. The way in which teams shape their teamwork is key in leveraging performance in the pre‐founding phase. Learning should help the team in establishing good teamwork and in expanding its members’ entrepreneurial capabilities. Leadership is needed to facilitate and guide this learning. Accordingly, we investigated learning and leadership as facilitators of performance in the pre‐founding phase. Specifically, we examined team reflexivity as a collective internal learning process and boundary spanning behaviour as an externally directed individual activity, operating at different levels in fostering team and individual performance. Charismatic team leadership was examined as a catalyst of learning, shaping team and individual performance ultimately. The multilevel mediation model was tested based on data from 196 members of 58 teams of a venture creation programme. Team reflexivity predicted team and individual performance. Boundary spanning behaviour was not related to performance. As hypothesised, charismatic team leadership predicted team and individual performance, both mediated by team reflexivity. This research highlights the relevance of team learning in pre‐founding teams and emphasises leadership in shaping learning and moving new ventures forward.     

Transformational and transactional leaderships,empowerment climate,and innovation performance: A multilevel analysis in the Chinese context

Innovation through creativity is an important factor in the success and competitive advantage of organizations. Theory and research suggest that both leadership and organizational climate have important consequences for individual creativity. However, researchers have rarely considered the interactive effects of leadership and organizational climate. This study taking a “Substitute for Leadership” perspective, develops and tests the idea that empowerment climate affect the relationship between leadership and followers' creative performance. Data were collected from 93 teams, including 465 team members and 93 team supervisors, in a large multinational company based in China. Hierarchical linear modelling was used to examine the hypothesized cross-level model. As expected, transformational leadership and team empowerment climate were positively related to subordinates' creative performance and transactional leadership was negatively related to subordinates' creative performance. In addition, the relationship between leadership and subordinates' creative performance was moderated by team empowerment climate. The study resulted in the implication of several major variables for explaining individual creativity in the Chinese context.     

Shared Leadership and Innovation: The Role of Vertical Leadership and Employee Integrity

Purpose

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between shared leadership, as a collective within-team leadership, and innovative behavior, as well as antecedents of shared leadership in terms of team composition and vertical transformational and empowering leadership.

Design/Methodology/Approach

Data were obtained from a field sample of 43 work teams, comprising 184 team members and their team leaders from two different companies. Team leaders rated the teams’ innovative behavior and their own leadership; team members provided information on their personality and their teams’ shared leadership.

Findings

Shared and vertical leadership, but not team composition, was positively associated with the teams’ level of innovative behavior. Vertical transformational and empowering leadership and team composition in terms of integrity were positively related to shared leadership.

Implications

Understanding how organizations can enhance their own innovation is crucial for the organizations’ competitiveness and survival. Furthermore, the increasing prevalence of teams, as work arrangements in organizations, raises the question of how to successfully manage teams. This study suggests that organizations should facilitate shared leadership which has a positive association with innovation.

Originality/Value

This is one of the first studies to provide evidence of the relationship between shared leadership and innovative behavior, an important organizational outcome. In addition, the study explores two important predictors of shared leadership, transformational and empowering leadership, and the team composition in respect to integrity. While researchers and practitioners agree that shared leadership is important, knowledge on its antecedents is still in its infancy.     

Empowering Leadership and Effective Collaboration in Geographically Dispersed Teams

Our research integrates theoretical perspectives related to distributed leadership in geographically dispersed teams with empowering leadership theory to build a multilevel model of virtual collaboration and performance in dispersed teams. We test the model with procurement teams in a major multinational corporation. Our results show a significant cross‐level effect of empowering team leadership, such that under conditions of high empowering team leadership, a team member's virtual teamwork situational judgment (VT‐SJ) is positively and significantly associated with his or her virtual collaboration behaviors and also indirectly with his or her individual performance in the team. At the team level, our findings also suggest that the impact of empowering leadership on team members’ aggregate virtual collaboration, and indirectly on team performance, increases at higher levels of team dispersion. These findings shed important light on the role of team leadership in fostering effective collaboration and performance of geographically dispersed virtual teams.     

领导职业支持对组织公民行为的影响:心理资本的作用

本研究探讨领导职业支持对工作团队成员组织公民行为的影响机制,研究采用问卷调查法,以10个地市的66个工作团队303名成员为调查对象,在控制被试的教育程度、工作经验及人口统计学变量之后,运用多层线性模型分析领导职业支持与团队成员心理资本及其组织公民行为的关系。结果发现：（1）领导职业支持对团队成员心理资本和组织公民行为有积极促进作用;（2）无论在团队层次还是员工层次,领导职业支持对成员组织公民行为有积极促进作用,成员心理资本在二者之间起完全中介作用。     

Different roles of shared and vertical leadership in promoting team creativity: Cultivating and synthesizing team members’ individual creativity

Drawing on the componential model of creativity (Amabile), we examined how shared leadership and a formally appointed leader's transformational leadership jointly cultivate team creativity in two studies. We conducted an experiment with a sample of 109 undergraduate students (32 teams) enrolled in a business plan competition (Study 1) and a field survey based on multisource, time-lagged data collected from 251 full-time employees working on 64 research and development teams (Study 2). The results from both studies revealed that shared leadership enhanced team members’ individual creative self-efficacy and individual creativity, which in turn improved team creativity. Moreover, the results from Study 2 showed that a formally appointed leader's use of different transformational leadership behaviors had different impacts on individual and team creativity. Individual-focused transformational leadership strengthened the positive effect of shared leadership on team members’ average individual creativity, whereas group-focused transformational leadership facilitated the translation of teams with high average individual creativity into teams with high levels of team creativity. The theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.     

团队工作重塑的形成与影响机制

团队工作重塑是影响团队有效性的关键性因素。基于工作设计理论和团队运作模型, 提出了一个关于团队工作重塑的前因后果的理论模型, 旨在建立团队工作重塑的逻辑关系网络。首先, 对团队工作重塑的概念和内涵进行分析, 并探讨测量工具的维度。接着从多层分析视角, 考察领导行为、工作特征、团队人格构成、人力资源管理系统对团队工作重塑的影响, 以及团队主动性动机状态中介作用。最后分析团队工作重塑对团队有效性的作用机制。     

嵌入于社会情境的工作重塑

工作重塑实质上是一种情境性的主动性行为。基于已有研究成果, 首先系统归纳工作重塑与社会情境因素之间关系的4种研究视角, 即社会情境是工作重塑的目标、社会情境因素是工作重塑的组成部分、社会情境因素影响工作重塑、社会情境因素为工作重塑设立边界条件。此外, 梳理并讨论社会情境因素影响工作重塑的内在机制以及社会情境因素与个体特征的交互对于工作重塑的影响、工作重塑在特定情境中的有效性两方面的研究。在此基础上, 结合其他相关变量的研究现状对嵌入于社会情境的工作重塑的未来研究进行展望, 包括探索工作重塑对他人的影响、探索团队工作重塑驱动个体工作重塑的多重路径、探索社会情境影响工作重塑的内在机制、探索社会情境与个体特征的交互如何影响工作重塑, 以及探讨基于中国社会情境的工作重塑的有效性。     

The effects of a job crafting intervention on the success of an organizational change effort in a blue-collar work environment

The current study in a blue-collar context investigates whether a job crafting intervention may facilitate employee adaptation to organizational change, while decreasing exhaustion and increasing positive attitudes towards change and safety behaviour. It was hypothesized that the intervention would increase job crafting behaviours (i.e., seeking resources, seeking challenges, and optimizing demands) resulting in decreased employee exhaustion, and improved change attitudes and employee safety behaviour (i.e., adherence to organization’s standard operating procedures). The quasi-experimental study revealed that, after the intervention (consisting of a workshop, four weeks of job crafting implementation, and an evaluative session), employees reported an increase in two of the three trained job crafting strategies (i.e., seeking challenges, optimizing demands). Moreover, those who participated in the intervention reported lower levels of exhaustion, improved cognitive and behavioural attitudes towards change, and increased safety behaviour. The intervention was found to improve the affective, cognitive, and behavioural components of a change attitude due to increases in seeking challenges. Results were similar after controlling for quality information and leadership behaviour during the change. It is concluded that a job crafting intervention and resulting job crafting behaviour can be an effective way to achieve successful adaptation to organizational change.     

A Multilevel Analysis of the Relationship between Shared Leadership and Creativity in Inter‐Organizational Teams

An inter‐organizational team, which consists of diverse members from different organizations to conduct an initiative, has been widely treated as a critical method to improve organizational innovation. This study proposes a multilevel model to test the relationship between shared leadership and creativity at both team‐ and individual level in the context of inter‐organizational teams. Multisource data were collected from 53 inter‐organizational teams. We obtain the following findings: first, shared leadership is positively related to both team creativity and individual creativity via knowledge sharing. Second, task interdependence positively moderates the relationship between shared leadership and knowledge sharing. Third, task interdependence positively moderates the relationship between knowledge sharing and team creativity, but does not moderate the relationship between knowledge sharing and individual creativity. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of the findings.     

A multilevel study of leadership, empowerment, and performance in teams

A multilevel model of leadership, empowerment, and performance was tested using a sample of 62 teams, 445 individual members, 62 team leaders, and 31 external managers from 31 stores of a Fortune 500 company. Leader-member exchange and leadership climate related differently to individual and team empowerment and interacted to influence individual empowerment. Also, several relationships were supported in more but not in less interdependent teams. Specifically, leader-member exchange related to individual performance partially through individual empowerment; leadership climate related to team performance partially through team empowerment; team empowerment moderated the relationship between individual empowerment and performance; and individual performance was positively related to team performance. Contributions to team leadership theory, research, and practices are discussed.     

Person-supervisor fit,needs-supplies fit,and team fit as mediators of the relationship between dual-focused transformational leadership and well-being in scientific teams

Team-based work structures have become prevalent in science. Scientific teams, however, are characterized by competing individual-level and team-level needs (i.e., by mixed-motive situations). This makes leading scientific teams particularly challenging: Balancing competing individual-level goals and common team-level goals requires a specific type of leadership that simultaneously considers both satisfying individual-level needs as well as team-level needs. The current study addresses this issue by combining the dual-focused model of transformational leadership with person-environment fit theory. Specifically, we investigated needs-supplies fit, person-supervisor fit, and team fit as mediators of the relationship between transformational leadership and scientific team members’ job satisfaction and work-related strain. In doing so, we provide a new perspective on leadership in scientific teams by explicitly differentiating individual-level and team-level effects of transformational leadership. We tested our hypotheses using a three-wave design with a sample of 134 members of 42 scientific teams. The relationships between individual-focused transformational leadership, job satisfaction, and work-related strain were mediated by needs-supplies fit and person-supervisor fit. Team-focused transformational leadership was positively related to job satisfaction and negatively related to work-related strain. Our findings contribute to further clarifying the mechanisms underlying the relationship between transformational leadership and members’ well-being in scientific teams.     

Translating self-efficacy in job performance over time: The role of job crafting

This investigation intends to uncover the mechanisms linking self-efficacy to job performance by analyzing the mediating role of job crafting. A two-wave study on 465 white-collar workers was conducted, matching participants’ self-report data (i.e., self-efficacy and job crafting) with supervisory performance ratings. The structural equation model showed a positive reciprocal relationship between self-efficacy and crafting behaviors. In turn, job crafting predicted performance positively over time. More importantly, results confirmed the mediating role of crafting actions, which may represent the behavioral process underlying the positive effect of self-efficacy on individual outcomes. Practical implications for organizations, such as encouraging bottom-up job design or designing job-crafting interventions, and future research directions are also offered.     

Psychological capital as a team phenomenon: Mediating the relationship between learning climate and outcomes at the individual and team levels

Psychological capital is a positive psychological state that influences employees’ behaviors and attitudes. Research has only recently begun to examine the phenomenon as a shared psychological team state. The purpose of this research is to examine the mediating role of team psychological capital in the relationship between learning climate and outcomes at the individual and team levels. The findings, which were carried out among 82 school management teams, indicated a positive relationship between learning climate and the team’s psychological capital, and between the team’s psychological capital and the individual’s job satisfaction and the team’s organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). It was also found that team’s psychological capital mediates the relationship between the team’s learning climate and job satisfaction, and between learning mechanisms and the team’s OCB. The findings might encourage research into psychological capital as a team phenomenon and encourage decision-makers to develop ways of reinforcing psychological capital among teams.     

Self-Efficacy and Political Skill as Comparative Predictors of Task and Contextual Performance: A Two-Study Constructive Replication

This study examined how competition within teams influences which type of achievement goals employees adopt. We studied how dispositional learning-goal and performance-goal orientation interact with team-level competition and predict whether team members adopt state learning or performance achievement goals. State achievement goals, in turn, were proximal antecedents of two outcome measures: job-related self-efficacy and supervisory ratings of job performance. The participants were 502 employees and 55 supervisors. Results confirmed that competition was positively associated with state performance goals. Trait performance-goal orientation influenced whether competition was negatively associated with state learning goals. In highly competitive teams, trait performance-goal orientation was negatively related to state learning goals, whereas in less competitive teams, a performance-goal orientation was positively related to state learning goals.     

The role of different levels of leadership in predicting self- and collective efficacy: evidence for discontinuity

This study identified potential discontinuities in the antecedents of efficacy beliefs across levels of analysis, with a particular focus on the role of leadership climate at different organizational levels. Random coefficient modeling analyses conducted on data collected from 2,585 soldiers in 86 combat units confirmed that soldiers' experience, role clarity, and psychological strain predicted self-efficacy to a greater extent than did leadership climate. Also, leadership climate at a higher organizational level related to self-efficacy through role clarity, whereas leadership climate at a lower organizational level related to self-efficacy through psychological strain. Group-level analyses identified leadership climate at a higher organizational level as the strongest predictor of collective efficacy. Theoretical and practical implications and directions for future research are discussed.     

领导正直的概念、测量及其展望

领导正直（leader integrity）作为一种道德品质,长期以来被认为是有效领导者的关键特征。近年来, 道德丑闻和管理者违法乱纪事件频频发生,引发了学术界对领导正直问题的关注。然而,学界对领导正直 的内涵、测量及其作用机制的研究尚处于起步阶段,关于领导正直的文献综述更是寥寥无几。本文从领导 正直的概念、测量、影响因素、作用机制和实施效果等方面,对国内外相关研究进行系统梳理和探讨。未 来研究应从领导正直的概念与维度的完善、影响因素的拓展和作用机制的深入识别等方面展开努力。     

Antecedents of team potency and team effectiveness: an examination of goal and process clarity and servant leadership

Integrating theories of self-regulation with team and leadership literatures, this study investigated goal and process clarity and servant leadership as 3 antecedents of team potency and subsequent team effectiveness, operationalized as team performance and organizational citizenship behavior. Our sample of 304 employees represented 71 teams in 5 banks. Results showed that team-level goal and process clarity as well as team servant leadership served as 3 antecedents of team potency and subsequent team performance and team organizational citizenship behavior. Furthermore, we found that servant leadership moderated the relationships between both goal and process clarity and team potency, such that the positive relationships between both goal and process clarity and team potency were stronger in the presence of servant leadership.