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Editorial
(2017)
Purpose Paradoxical leadership (PL) is an emerging perspective to understand how leaders help followers deal with paradoxical demands. Recently, the positive relationship between PL and follower performance was established. This paper builds on and extends this research by interpreting PL as sensegiving and developing theory about mediation in the relationship between PL and adaptive and proactive performance. Design/methodology/approach The paper develops a new measure for PL as sensegiving and provides a test of the mediation model with data from two different sources and two measurement times in a German company. Findings Multilevel mediation analysis (N = 154) supports the mediation model. Originality/value The paper presents sensegiving about paradox as a core element of PL, which informs the choice of change-readiness as mediator. This study also develops and validates a scale to measure PL in future research.
In a multisource, lagged design field study of 66 consulting teams, we investigated the role of leader mood in unlocking the performance potential of functionally diverse teams. In line with our hypotheses, we found that, given high levels of leader positive mood, functional diversity was positively related to collective team identification. In contrast, given high levels of leader negative mood, functional diversity was positively associated with information elaboration in teams. Furthermore, results showed that functional diversity was most strongly related to team performance when both leader positive mood and leader negative mood were high. This study highlights the value of examining seemingly contradictory leadership aspects in the effort to gain a fuller understanding of how to foster performance in diverse teams.
Practitioner points
To effectively lead diverse teams, leaders need to navigate between the need to promote unique ideas (i.e., information elaboration) and the simultaneous need to pull together diverse members towards a common identity.
Leader mood addresses both of these needs. When the team leader exhibited a positive mood, team functional diversity was positively related to members' identification with the team. By contrast, when the team leader displayed a negative mood, team functional diversity was positively related to information elaboration.
Over a 12-day period, diverse teams performed best when the leader showed both positive and negative mood.
Leaders of diverse teams are required to be sensitive to the affective tone of their team and aware of how their emotional displays influence team members' moods and behaviours as well as team processes.
Scholars have argued that visionary leadership is an effective tool to motivate followers because it provides them with meaning and purpose. However, previous research tells us little about which leaders and under which circumstances leaders engage in visionary leadership. We draw on theories of human and social capital to argue that leader work centrality is an important antecedent of visionary leadership, and especially so for leaders with low organizational tenure. Moreover, we propose that visionary leadership then provides followers with meaningfulness and thereby decreases their turnover intentions. Our predictions were confirmed by data from a two-wave, lagged-design field study with 101 leader-follower dyads. Overall, our research identifies an important antecedent of visionary leadership, a specific situation in which this antecedent is particularly important, and provides empirical evidence for why visionary leadership can bind followers to an organization.
Navigating the unknown
(2024)
Visionary leadership is considered to be one of the most important elements of effective leadership. Among other things, it is related to followers' perceived meaningfulness of their work. However, little is known about whether uncertainty in the workplace affects visionary leadership's effects. Given that uncertainty is rising in many, if not most, workplaces, it is vital to understand whether this development influences the extent to which visionary leadership is associated with followers' perceived meaningfulness. In a two-source, lagged design field study of 258 leader-follower dyads from different settings, we show that uncertainty moderates the relation between visionary leadership and followers' perceived meaningfulness such that this relation is more strongly positive when uncertainty is high, rather than low. Moreover, we show that with increasing uncertainty, visionary leadership is more negatively related to followers' turnover intentions via perceived meaningfulness. This research broadens our understanding of how visionary leadership may be a particularly potent tool in times of increasing uncertainty.
Findings in the extant literature are mixed concerning when and how gender diversity benefits team performance. We develop and test a model that posits that gender-diverse teams outperform gender-homogeneous teams when perceived time pressure is low, whereas the opposite is the case when perceived time pressure is high. Drawing on the categorization-elaboration model (CEM; van Knippenberg, De Dreu, & Homan, 2004), we begin with the assumption that information elaboration is the process whereby gender diversity fosters positive effects on team performance. However, also in line with the CEM, we argue that this process can be disrupted by adverse team dynamics. Specifically, we argue that as time pressure increases, higher gender diversity leads to more team withdrawal, which, in turn, moderates the positive indirect effect of gender diversity on team performance via information elaboration such that this effect becomes weaker as team withdrawal increases. In an experimental study of 142 four-person teams, we found support for this model that explains why perceived time pressure affects the performance of gender-diverse teams more negatively than that of gender-homogeneous teams. Our study sheds new light on when and how gender diversity can become either an asset or a liability for team performance.