Research On The Multi-level Influence Effect Of Team Leader's Empowering Leadership On Team-and Individual-level Intrapreneurship

With the ever-changing organizational environment,more and more enterprise managers choose to empower employees in exchange for more responsibilities and better performance,so as to help enterprises gain lasting competitive advantages.For this reason,empowering leadership behavior(ELB)has been widely concerned in management practice and academic research,and has achieved fruitful research results.However,the existing research on ELB focuses more on the traditional variables of organizational behavior,and pay little attention on the emerging intrapreneurship in recent years.Since the 18 th CPC National Congress,the "mass entrepreneurship and innovation initiative" has become a national strategic measure to foster new drivers of development.In this context,China's entrepreneurial trend continues to strengthen.According to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor survey,China's entrepreneurial activity index is higher than that of developed countries such as the US,the UK,Germany and Japan.Corporate Intrapreneurship is being promoted in more and more enterprises,and many examples of Intrapreneurship models have emerged,such as the “micro-enterprise” in Haier,the “fission entrepreneurship” in Guangzhou Phnix Technology,the “project co-investment system” in Vanke and the “group boss system” in Shenglong Electric.In the practice of intrapreneurship,many creative projects are initiated and promoted from the bottom up by ground level employees.However,previous studies on intrapreneurship have mostly focused on top-down business actions driven by senior decision makers,and rarely looked at intrapreneurship at lower levels of the organization.Entrepreneurship is about identifying and capitalizing on value-creating opportunities,which means breaking the rules.Therefore,appropriate autonomy is particularly important for the entrepreneurial activities of lower-level work teams.Some case studies point out that empowerment practices play important an role in corporate intrapreneurship such as Haier Group,HSTYLE and Guangzhou Phnix Technology.ELB is an important form of empowerment practicing in organization,that is,leaders emphasize the significance of work to subordinates,promote participatory decision-making,convey the confidence of high-performance and provide autonomy to weaken hierarchy constraints,in order to help subordinates eliminate their internal powerlessness and stimulate their motivation for work.However,few studies have explored the impact of ELB on intrapreneurship of lower-level work team in enterprises.Therefore,it is necessary to explore this issue.In addition,although the academia has conducted extensive research on the impact of ELB,there are still no agreement in relevant conclusions,and the meta-analysis done by foreign scholars only focuses on English literature.China is the second largest economy in the world and the "cultural sovereign state" of the Confucian Culture Cluster.Moreover,China has a huge number of companies and labor forces.Therefore,the meta-analytical study should be fully integrated into the research in the Chinese context to discover real facts about the leadership effectiveness of ELB.By focusing on the above hot issues and research deficiencies,this paper aims to answer the following questions: what is the relationship between ELB and leadership effectiveness after comprehensively considering Chinese and foreign literature?How does team leader's ELB affect team entrepreneurial orientation? How does it affect employee intrapreneurial behavior?This paper intends to answer the above questions through three sub-researches:(1)Meta-analysis of ELB and leadership effectiveness.Systematic retrieval of Chinese and foreign research literature,comprehensively test its relationship with leadership effectiveness(work attitude,individual,team & organizational performance)through meta-analysis,and examine the moderation effects of sample territories,ELB scales,data types,and industry types to clarify its boundary conditions;besides,the author will also examine its relationship with Innovativeness,Proactiveness and Risk-taking.In this way,the present paper can answer some important theoretical problems that have not been clearly explained,and provide reference for the proposal and optimization of empirical model in the next.(2)The impact of team leader's ELB on team entrepreneurship orientation.Based on the I-M-O theoretical framework,this paper try to explore the mediator effect of team relational coordination and the boundary role of two important situational factors(Team task interdependence & ELB differentiation).(3)The cross-level "double-edged sword" effect of team leader's ELB on employee intrapreneurial behavior.Along some scholars point out that the impact of ELB is not universal and may have its “dark side”,and based on the Transactional Theory of Stress,this paper focusing on how team leader's ELB through individual challenge–hindrance stress impact employee intrapreneurial behavior with a cross-level "double-edged sword" effect and the contingency effect of individual goal orientation.Through theoretical analysis,meta-analysis and empirical research,this paper has reached the following conclusions:(1)ELB is positively(negatively)related to individual positive(negative)work attitudes;ELB is positively related to individual(team)performance and its various dimensions,and is negatively related to counterproductive behavior,but the positive relationship with organizational performance is not significant;Its relationship with individual(team)performance and individual(team)task performance is stronger in the East Asian samples,but there is no significant difference between the East and West in individual(team)innovation performance and individual(team)contextual performance;ELB scale and data types could moderating the relationship between ELB and individual performance,while the industry type has no moderation effect;in addition,it is also positively related to individual(team)proactiveness and individual risk-taking.(2)Team leader's ELB has a positive impact on team entrepreneurial orientation and team relational coordination plays a part of mediation effect;team task interdependence positively moderating the mediation effect;ELB differentiation inverted U-shaped moderating the mediation effect,that is,the mediator effect of team relational coordination is stronger when the ELB differentiation is moderate.(3)Team leader's ELB has a positive impact on employee intrapreneurial behavior,and challenge stress plays a positive mediator,while the negative mediator effect of hindrance stress is not significant;learning goal orientation positively moderating the positive mediation effect of challenge stress;performance goal orientation(PGO)can strengthen the negative mediation effect of hindrance stress,that is,the negative mediation effect of challenge stress is significant when the PGO is high.