Unpacking Psychological Ownership: How Transactional and Transformational Leaders Motivate Ownership

Psychological ownership represents feelings of responsibility for and possession over a target, which can be both tangible in terms of physical resources, or intangible regarding one's relationships. Here we examine how two well-established leadership styles can trigger six different facets of psychological ownership and their corresponding ownership behaviors, by using regulatory focus and identity theory to explain how psychological ownership emerges and influences an individual's work behavior. We provide specific propositions that link two leadership styles to an individual's activated regulatory focus and self-identity, which results in six different facets of ownership. We use these different facets of ownership to examine how each contributes to explaining how leaders motivate their followers to engage in and take on different work challenges and opportunities, thus advancing both the leadership and psychological ownership literatures. We combine leadership style and psychological ownership to determine the type of ownership behavior and work performance that results based on which ownership facets are triggered.

Walking Our Evidence-Based Talk: The Case of Leadership Development in Business Schools

Academics have lamented that practitioners do not always adopt scientific evidence in practice, yet while academics preach evidence-based management (EBM), they do not always practice it. This paper extends prior literature on difficulties to engage in EBM with insights from behavioral integrity (i.e., the study of what makes individuals and collectives walk their talk). We focus on leader development, widely used but often critiqued for lacking evidence. Analyzing 60 interviews with academic directors of leadership centers at top business schools, we find that the selection of programs does not always align with scientific recommendations nor do schools always engage in high-quality program evaluation. Respondents further indicated a wide variety of challenges that help explain the disconnect between business schools claiming A but practicing B. Behavioral Integrity theory would argue these difficulties are rooted in the lack of an individually owned and collectively endorsed identity, an identity of an evidence-based leader developer (EBLD). A closer inspection of our data confirmed that the lack of a clear and salient EBLD identity makes it difficult for academics to walk their evidence-based leader development talk. We discuss how these findings can help facilitate more evidence-based leader development in an academic context.

Leadership Styles and Psychological Empowerment: A Meta-Analysis

Psychological empowerment has become a popular construct in organizational research and practice. Leadership ranks high among the best predictors of employees’ psychological empowerment, yet little is known about which leadership styles prove more effective than others. This meta-analysis investigates the effects of four leadership styles on psychological empowerment. More specifically, we test whether empowering leadership evokes more psychological empowerment than transformational leadership, servant leadership, or transactional leadership. We found that empowering, transformational and servant leadership contribute almost equally to psychological empowerment. No relationship was found with transactional leadership. In an explorative manner, we tested the effects on the different dimensions of psychological empowerment. We found that the leadership styles had a weaker influence on the competence dimension of psychological empowerment. We also investigated the effects of several moderators on the relationships with psychological empowerment: country culture (power balanced freedom (PBF)), study design (cross-sectional vs. multi-wave studies) and publication status (published vs. unpublished). We found no moderating effects of culture, which indicates the universally empowering effects of the leadership styles. The relationships between leadership and empowerment were somewhat weaker when data were collected at different measurement points, and publication bias does not seem to be an issue in this research field.

Resilience and Turnover Intention: The Role of Mindful Leadership, Empathetic Leadership, and Self-Regulation

This study investigates the impact of mindful and empathetic leadership on resilience and turnover intention, with self-regulation as a mediating variable. A quantitative survey was administered to 188 nurses dealing with COVID-19’s patients in Indonesia. Data were analyzed using Process v3.5 Andrew F. Hayes in SPSS. This study revealed that mindful leadership reduces turnover intention, and empathetic leadership increases resilience, while mindful leadership does not increase resilience, and empathetic leadership does not lessen turnover intention. We also conclude that self-regulation mediates the relationship between mindful leadership/empathetic leadership and turnover intention/resilience. Despite being limited to the Indonesian context, this research offers several contributions from both theoretical and practical perspectives. First, this research established the importance of mindful and empathetic leadership to promote resilience and reduce the turnover intention of nurses in the time of crisis. Second, we confirmed self-regulation as the mediating variable for those relationships. Practically, we suggest that having empathetic and mindful leaders is effective in supporting nurses to deal with COVID-19 patients.

Unbalanced, Unfair, Unhappy, or Unable? Theoretical Integration of Multiple Processes Underlying the Leader Mistreatment-Employee CWB Relationship with Meta-Analytic Methods

Although a litany of theoretical accounts exists to explain why mistreated employees engage in counterproductive work behaviors (CWBs), little is known about whether these mechanisms are complementary or mutually exclusive, or the effect of context on their explanatory strength. To address these gaps, this meta-analytic investigation tests four theoretically-derived mechanisms simultaneously to explain the robust relationship between leader mistreatment and employee CWB: (1) a social exchange perspective, which argues that mistreated employees engage in negative reciprocal behaviors to counterbalance experienced mistreatment; (2) a justice perspective, whereby mistreated employees experience moral outrage and engage in retributive behaviors against the organization and its members; (3) a stressor-emotion perspective, which suggests that mistreated employees engage in CWBs to cope with their negative affect; and (4) a self-regulatory perspective, which proposes that mistreated employees are simply unable to inhibit undesirable behaviors. Moreover, we also examine whether the above model holds across cultures that vary on power distance. Our meta-analytic structural equation model demonstrated that all but the justice mechanism significantly mediated the relationship between leader mistreatment and employee CWBs, with negative affect emerging as the strongest explanatory mechanism in both high and low power distance cultures. Given these surprising results, as the stressor-emotion perspective is less frequently invoked in the literature, this paper highlights not only the importance of investigating multiple mechanisms together when examining the leader mistreatment-employee CWB relationship, but also the need to develop more nuanced theorizing about these mechanisms, particularly for negative affect.

Stay Humble and Fly High: The Roles of Subordinate Voice and Competitive Work Context in the Linkage Between Leader Humility and Career Success

This study examines the relationship between leaders’ humility and their career success. We propose that humble leaders are more likely to occupy central positions in their subordinate teams’ voice networks where they improve their own performance and gain favorable reward recommendations. We also argue that in seemingly disadvantageous competitive work contexts, humble leaders become more central in the team voice network and increase their career prospects. We found support for these hypotheses in a multisource field study of 116 supervisors, 461 subordinates, and 34 shop managers from a Chinese company and in a vignette-based experiment with 233 working adults. Theoretical and practical implications for career success, leader humility, and voice literature are discussed.

The Trickle-Down Effects of Inclusive Leadership on Employees’ Innovative Behavior: The Joint Moderating Effects of Vicarious Learning and Organizational Inclusion Climate

The supervisor-subordinate dyad has been well articulated in the framework of inclusive leadership and employee outcomes. Applying a multisource dataset from China, the present study develops a trickle-down model of inclusive leadership across three hierarchical levels (i.e., top managers, supervisors, and employees). Building on social learning theory and social exchange theory, the study found empirical support for the assumptions that both top management and supervisory inclusive leadership have a positive effect on employees’ innovative behavior. In addition, the findings support the proposition that supervisor's inclusive leadership mediates the effects of top manager's inclusive leadership on employees’ innovative behavior. The study also verified that vicarious learning and organizational inclusion climate jointly moderate the relationship between the top manager's inclusive leadership and the supervisor's inclusive leadership. The contribution, limitations, and future directions are also discussed.

How Do Leaders vs. Followers Construct Followership? A Field Study of implicit followership theories and Work-Related Affect Using Latent Profile Analysis

In this study, we integrate follower categorization theory with affective events theory (AET) to investigate the extent to which within-person patterns of implicit followership theories (IFTs) and work-related affect predict job satisfaction for leaders versus followers. Latent profile analysis (LPA) was used to identify and to describe distinct profiles of IFTs and work-related affect for leaders versus followers. For the sample of 242 leaders, two profiles with distinct patterns of IFTs and work-related affect ( Proactive and Alienated) were found. Leaders with Proactive views of followers showed above-average ratings of work-related affect, while leaders with Alienated views of followers showed lower ratings of work-related affect. In the sample of 240 followers, there were four profiles of followers with distinct patterns of IFTs and work-related affect ( Conforming, Alienated, Proactive, and Negative). Despite showing a similar pattern of IFTs, followers with Alienated views of their own role showed below-average ratings of work-related affect, while followers with Negative views of their own role showed the highest ratings of work-related affect. These findings suggest that IFTs and work-related affect show unique within-person interaction for followers. Furthermore, for followers, profile membership of IFTs and work-related affect significantly predicted mean levels of job satisfaction. Implications are discussed.

Leading Remotely in a Time of Crisis: Relationships with Emotional Intelligence

Leaders around the world have been thrust into leading remotely, using virtual platforms and other various technologies to communicate and stay engaged with their employees and teams during this current extraordinary global crisis. Previous research supports that leaders share concerns around trust, communication, engagement, and support when leading remotely. Prior research also identifies “people skills” as essential in overcoming these concerns. We propose that emotional intelligence is essential in leading remotely during crisis situations. Thus, the current study explores the relationships between the construct of emotional intelligence and the emotional intelligence composites of self-perception, self-expression, interpersonal relationships, decision-making, and stress management with leader concerns when leading remotely during a time of crisis.

Are Leaders and Followers Receiving What They Give? A Long-Term Examination of the Reciprocal Relationship Between Relative LMX and Relative OCB-Helping

Relying on social comparison theory and the norm of reciprocity perspective, the present study aims to longitudinally investigate the specific relationships between relative leader–member exchange (RLMX) and relative organizational citizenship behavior (ROCB). We examined the potentially bidirectional relationship between these two constructs using data consisting of 1,420 time-lagged observations from 725 employees surveyed at multiple time points. Our results indicate that performing more helping behaviors than the group average (ROCB) leads to a subsequent higher quality of relationship with the leader compared to the group average (RLMX), above and beyond the effect of organizational citizenship behavior on RLMX. This effect is stronger than the reverse relationship (i.e., the effect of RLMX on ROCB, above and beyond the leader–member exchange). Implications for theory and practice are discussed.