A Multi-level Study Between Team Empowerment And Perception Of Barrier To Innovation

In actual life, many managers and leaders have realized the significant influence of empowerment to the loyalty of employee and organizational performance, but they only stay at the level that delegate employee authority without concerning about whether their employee are aware of the psychological empowerment experience. Thus, managers and leaders need to give importance to the perception of psychological empowerment of employee. This study, from a perspective of psychological experience of employee, explores the multi-level relationship between individual psychological empowerment and team empowerment as well as their impact on innovation barrier. It is not only beneficial to enrich the theory between individual psychological empowerment and team empowerment, but also does good to enterprise managers to play good role on balancing the empowerment between individual and teams, in addition, assisting organizations to find the self-existed innovation barrier.This study takes firms of multiple industries in Guangdong and Shanxi province as investigation objects, collects data from 89 teams and constructs multi-level research model between psychological empowerment and perception of barrier to innovation via a combination of confirmatory factor analysis, hierarchical linear model and Intermediary regulation model. It draws conclusions from statistic data and qualitative information as follows:(1) Individual empowerment and team empowerment are mutual positively and significantly related.(2)Individual with high collectivism will perform higher individual psychological empowerment at the same team psychological empowerment.(3)Team psychological empowerment mediates the relationship between psychological empowerment and perception of barrier to innovation.(4)There is not significant moderating effect of job formalization to team psychological empowerment and perception of barrier to innovation.