A Study On Relationship Among Team Empowerment,Authoritarian Leadership And Team Performance

With increasing uncertainty of the environment,there are more organizations adopting team decision making approach instead of simply individual opinion.Through empowerment,organizational managers are able to encourage employees to bring their specialty and creativity into team decision making process.Considering significant impact of team empowerment efficiency on team performance,how to empower teams has attracted more and more attention in both theoretical research and managerial practice.Current team empowerment researches adopt two study approaches: structural empowerment and psychological empowerment.This study believes that besides structural component,team atmosphere factor,such as team psychological safety,is also an important antecedent of psychological empowerment.Under Chinese context,this study examines moderating effect of authoritarian leadership on team empowerment process.Based on an empirical research of 254 doctor teams sample from 12 top level Chinese hospitals,this paper examines how organizational structural and atmosphere factors affect team empowerment and performance.Results show that,both structural empowerment and team psychological safety have positive effects on team performance through the mediating effect of psychological empowerment.Moreover,authoritarian leadership negatively moderates the relationship between team psychological safety and psychological empowerment.These findings provide empirical evidence for inconsistent research findings regarding the relationship between two perspectives of empowerment in current research.Besides,the theoretical model explores mechanism of team empowerment and antecedents of team performance.At the same time,this study explains boundary condition of team empowerment process.In addition,this research also proposes practical advice to corporate empowerment practice and authoritarian leadership.