Leader – Team Contextual Effects on Member Psychological Empowerment – Performance Relations

We advance a cross-level model of leader and team influences on healthcare employees’ individual empowerment – performance relationships. We argue that leaders shape the proximal team work context and thereby drive and moderate empowerment relations. Using a sample of 552 healthcare professionals in teams, our results indicate that team-oriented leader behaviors can positively influence both team processes and team psychological safety. In turn, team processes exhibited a cross-level direct influence on individual employees’ psychological empowerment levels, whereas team psychological safety evidenced an accentuating cross-level moderation influence on the empowerment – performance relationship. Empowerment was found to only relate positively to changes in performance over time when team psychological safety levels were relatively high. Overall, our results suggest that leaders can shape team contextual environments which, in turn, can influence their members’ motivational states and behaviors. Implications for future theory, research, and practice are discussed.