Research On Antecedents And Effects Of Team Leadership Under Crisis Situation

The devastating earthquake measuring 8.0 on the Richter scale jolted Wenchuan County of southwest China's Sichuan Province at 2:28 pm, on May 12,2008.Lots of houses fell down and thousands of people were killed. The earchquake brought huge adversities and sufferings. When disaster struck, help came from all sides. Numerous rescue teams, volunteers and all sectors of the society provided moral and material assistance and support for loss reduction and reconstruction.In order to assist future leaders in handling crises and rescues, saving more lifes composedly, Sichuan Huaxi Hosiptial, Xian-Janssen Pharmaceutical Ltd.,University of Washington Foster School of Business, and UESTC School of Management and Economics cooperated together and initiated the project "Crisis Leadership Research" in October,2008.Through investigation and study on medical relief teams involving post-earthquake rescues, the project would collect and research the experiences and lessons in the process of disaster relief. Meanwhile, it was expected to be helpful and have some implications for similar disasters.Under this kind of crisis situations, such as earthquake, time is life and efficiency. Team members had the same goal to treat and cure more wounded persons as quickly as possible. At the same time, members encountered enormous pressure. This dissertation tried to answer the following questions:will the diversity of members in teams established for recures be helpful for decreasing perceived environment uncertainty faced by teams? Similiarly, what kind of influcences will the diversity have on intragroup conflict? Will cognitive conflict transfer to emotional conflict? In the context of different levels of perceived environment uncertainty, what kind of expection of their leaders will team members have? Or will leaders modify their leadership behaviors to adapt to the certain environment? What kind of effects will varied leadership styles leaders employed have on team results, such as decision quality? In addition, how will the team process variable, i.e.,conflict, affect decision quality? Does intragroup conflict work as an imediating variable between leadership and team result?It is found that under natural crisis situations, such as earthquake, team diversity in age, education level, and working years in medical systems was useful for decreasing perceived information uncertainty, while gender diversity was beneficial to reduce perceived risk uncertainty. Besides, team diversity had no effect on intragroup conflict, which is different with previous findings on team diversity and conflict.Team members who had differences in perceived environment uncertainty would feel various psychological securities. Therefore they had differenct expectation of leaders. Theory of situation of leadership demonstrates that leaders can modify their leadership behaviors in light of varied situations. The study found that the higher the level of perceived risk uncertainty by team members, the more moral leadership employed by leaders. The explorative leaders were more needed at this time. While the more adequate the level of perceived information uncertainty, the more moral leadership. The executive leaders were more expected this moment.Besides considering the relationship between paternalistic leadership and corresponding situation, this study extended to investigate the effect of leadership (moral leadership and authoritarian leadership) on decision quality and found more authoritarian leadership could decrease decision quality, while more moral leadership would be advantageous to the improvement of decision quality.There was no mediating effect for cognitive conflict between leadership and decision quality, whereas emotional conflict partially mediated the relationship between leadership and decision quality. Emotional conflict would affect decision quality negatively. Moral leadership helped decrease emotional conflict, therefore increase decision quality indirectly. However, authoritarian leadership could increase intragroup emotional conflict, and reduce decision quality indirectly.These findings enrich the related studies in diversity, uncertainty, paternalistic leadership and intragroup conflict, and so on. In pratice, they also have some implications for composition of secure teams, team leadership and intragroup conflict resolution.