The Impact Mechanism Of Work Team Leaders’ Resilience On Followers’ Work Outcomes

With more and more organizations follow the trend of flatter management, work teams are playing a vital role in finishing the work assignments. And along with the global economy integration and rapid changes of new technologies, organizations are faced with very complex and changeable management situations. This calls for high resilient team leaders who can not only quickly recover from work related adversities by himself but also encourage team members with their positive psychological resources. In this way, members will be better equipped in face of work challenges and can enjoy positive work attitudes, proactive work related behaviors and good mental health. Hence, we aimed to explore the influence of team leader’s resilience on members’organizational commitment, organizational citizenship behavior and burnout at workplace.In the present study, we adopted longitudinal study and surveyed 91 work teams with several questionnaires including member rated resilience scale, organizational commitment scale and burnout scale, leader rated resilience scale and organizational citizenship behavior scale. We collected data from 330 team members and 91 leaders working in different companies in Shanghai, and used description statistics, reliability and correlation analyses, and multilevel hierarchical linear model to analyze the data.According to the results, all the measures have acceptable reliability coefficients. The HLM result showed that leader resilience was significantly correlated with member resilience, which in turn correlated with all work outcomes including organizational commitment, interpersonal citizenship behavior (OCBI), organizational citizenship behavior (OCBO) and burnout. Thus, member resilience acted as a partial mediator in the relationship between leader resilience and work outcomes.In this research, we explored the correlation between leader resilience and member work related outcomes with data collected from both team leaders and members. The results demonstrated that managers should pay more attention to improve team leaders’resilience, and to make sure it can be tricked down to members. In addition, the partial mediator of member resilience provided a direction for future studies to explore the mechanisms of how leader resilience would influence employee’s work outcomes.