Building on Bell and Kozlowski’s (2002) framework, this study proposes that formal leaders in virtual teams can foster shared leadership by using directive behaviors that establish structural support systems. A 10-week field study of 392 team members from 70 teams across two Fortune 500 companies supports the proposed model: directive leadership enhances shared leadership indirectly through team empowerment. This indirect effect is amplified when location diversity is high and perceived media richness is low. The findings contribute to the virtual teams and leadership literatures and offer practical recommendations for leaders managing distributed work.
Banks increasingly rely on employees’ collective creativity to achieve sustainable growth. Drawing on the componential theory of creativity, this study investigates how inclusive leadership influences team creativity through two parallel mediators: team relational energy and team bottom-line mentality. It further examines leader gender as a boundary condition. Multi-source, multi-wave data from 181 teams in Pakistani commercial banks were analyzed at the team level. Results indicate that inclusive leadership elevates creativity by energizing interpersonal connections (relational energy), yet suppresses it when teams become overly fixated on bottom-line outcomes (bottom-line mentality), advancing gender and creativity research in the Pakistani banking sector.
Intergroup dialogue (IGD) is a co-facilitated small-group educational intervention designed to foster engagement across differences through relationship building, dialogic skill development, and action-oriented learning. Using retrospective pretest-posttest survey data from 175 student and staff/faculty participants in 21 voluntary IGD groups at a large, public, predominantly White institution, this study tests an integrated four-factor framework of IGD learning: Awareness, Intergroup Relationships, Action to Intervene, and Capacity to Advance Equity. Results support the four-factor structure, measurement invariance across race, and significant reported change across all four learning areas.
While transformational leadership benefits self-managing teams, its uneven distribution (i.e., differentiated transformational leadership) can harm helping norms due to perceived inequities. Drawing on the theoretical framework of group norm emergence and using a multi-source, time-lagged survey of 91 work teams in Taiwan, we propose and examine how the least-supported members’ proactivity mitigates the destructive effects of differentiated transformational leadership. We anticipate this research to bring important insights about how individual members can take agency to offset the destructive effect of differentiated leadership, and the conclusions offer practical guidance to organizations and leadership coaches aiming to develop team managers.
Teams must adapt to shifting task demands. Drawing on contingency and adaptive leadership theories, we tested two configurational pathways (additive complementarity and interactive synergy) linking leadership structure and style to team adaptive performance. In a longitudinal laboratory experiment, 80 four-person teams were randomly assigned to a 2 (shared vs. centralized) × 2 (empowering vs. directive) design and completed seven firefighting scenarios, facing a complexity change halfway through the experiment. Empowering leadership improved post-change recovery; shared leadership showed a parallel marginal effect. Their combination outperformed all other configurations. Findings support an additive complementarity pathway, through which leadership configurations drive team adaptation.
