Self‐monitoring personality trait at work: An integrative narrative review and future research directions

In this narrative review, we provide an overview of the self‐monitoring literature as it applies to the workplace context. Our starting point to the review is a meta‐analysis of self‐monitoring literature published in 2002 by Day, Schleicher, Unckless, and Hiller. After providing an overview of the theoretical basis of self‐monitoring and its measurement, we present a summary of the broad literature on self‐monitoring to examine the implications of self‐monitoring for employees and organizations. Based on our review, we identify the main outcomes of self‐monitoring as well as findings of the literature treating self‐monitoring as a moderator. We provide evidence that self‐monitoring has potential downsides, which would benefit from further investigation. We conclude our review by identifying important potential future research directions.     

Contextualizing leaders' interpretations of proactive followership

Although proactive followership behavior is often viewed as instrumental to group success, leaders do not always respond favorably to the actions of overly eager followers. Guided by a constructivist perspective, we investigated how interpretations of followership differ across the settings in which acts of leadership and followership emerge. In thematically analyzing data from semi‐structured interviews with leaders of high‐performing teams, we depict how the construal of follower behaviors relates to various contextual factors underscoring leader–follower interactions. Prototypical characteristics were described in relation to ideal followership (i.e., active independent thought, ability to process self‐related information accurately, collective orientation, and relational transparency). However, proactive followership behaviors were subject to the situational and relational demands that were salient during leader–follower interactions. Notably, the presence of third‐party observers, the demands of the task, stage in the decision‐making process, suitability of the targeted issue, and relational dynamics influenced which follower behaviors were viewed as appropriate from the leader's perspective. These findings provide insight into when leaders are more likely to endorse proactive followership, suggesting that proactive followership requires an awareness of how to calibrate one's actions in accordance with prevailing circumstances. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

安全领导力国内外研究现状分析

为了推动安全领导力的研究,使用文献分析的方法,研究了安全领导力的国内外研究现状,探讨了其未来研究方向。结果表明:目前安全领导力的主要研究内容为安全领导力对安全绩效或安全行为的作用机理和不同领导类型对安全绩效或安全行为的影响;对安全领导力的研究方法多为问卷调查法;安全领导力的未来研究方向应集中在安全领导行为构成研究、安全领导力测评量表开发以及安全领导力修炼3个方面。     

Predicting safety culture: the roles of employer, operations manager and safety professional

Introduction: This study explores predictive factors in safety culture. Method: In 2008, a sample 939 employees was drawn from 22 departments of a telecoms firm in five regions in central Taiwan. The sample completed a questionnaire containing four scales: the employer safety leadership scale, the operations manager safety leadership scale, the safety professional safety leadership scale, and the safety culture scale. The sample was then randomly split into two subsamples. One subsample was used for measures development, one for the empirical study. Results: A stepwise regression analysis found four factors with a significant impact on safety culture (R² = 0.337): safety informing by operations managers; safety caring by employers; and safety coordination and safety regulation by safety professionals. Safety informing by operations managers (ß = 0.213) was by far the most significant predictive factor. Impact on industry: The findings of this study provide a framework for promoting a positive safety culture at the group level.     

Transformative experiences for Hurricanes Katrina and Rita disaster volunteers

The massive destruction caused by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 provided an opportunity for many volunteers to be involved with disaster relief work. Exposure to devastation and personal trauma can have long‐lasting and sometimes detrimental effects on people providing help. This qualitative study explored the experience of volunteer relief workers who provided disaster relief services after the hurricanes. Three major themes emerged: emotional reactions that included feelings of shock, fatigue, anger and grief as well as sleep disturbances; frustration with leadership; and life‐changing personal transformation. Stress reactions were noted but appeared to be mitigated by feelings of compassion for the victims and personal satisfaction in being able to provide assistance. Suggestions are provided for further research.     

An examination of shared leadership configurations and their effectiveness in teams

A key challenge in the shared leadership literature has been a limited understanding of how multiple leadership activities are shared across team members and roles. We address this issue by conceptualizing and operationalizing shared leadership using both its content (i.e., what leadership roles are shared) and distribution (i.e., how leadership is shared across members and roles). In an exploratory study comprised of 129 work teams, we use latent profile analysis (LPA) to identify multiple shared leadership configurations that vary in the extent of sharing. Our second study of 103 MBA teams supports these findings and further (a) considers what shared leadership configurations have the greatest influence on team effectiveness, (b) examines the mediating role of teamwork processes, and (c) investigates the moderating role of temporal dispersion. We advance current research by demonstrating that shared leadership typically manifests in collective (i.e., members share all leadership roles) and distributed configurations (i.e., members hold one leadership role while other members hold other leadership roles), which has implications for team processes and effectiveness. Specifically, we show that collective configurations have higher team effectiveness (compared to distributed configurations) owing to improved teamwork processes and observe that these effects are more pronounced when temporal dispersion is high.     

A case study of the opportunities and trade-offs associated with deproclamation of a protected area following a land claim in South Africa

Reconciling conservation and social justice imperatives is a major challenge facing many postcolonial states worldwide. Where historically disenfranchised communities have laid legal claim to protected areas, the typical resolution has been collaborative management agreements between the state and claimant communities. The real outcomes of such strategies for people and ecosystems have been seriously questioned, although alternative approaches are seldom explored. Here, we reflect on one such alternative that was pursued in a case in South Africa, where the land was handed back to the community and a replacement protected area created. Our objective was to explore the opportunities and trade-offs associated with this approach for communities and conservation agencies alike, and to compare these to typical collaborative management outcomes. Methods included key informant interviews, focus group discussions and household surveys. We find that, surprisingly, this approach created more benefits for the conservation agency than for claimant communities. Indeed, the community experiences bore a striking resemblance to those experienced in collaborative management settings: intra-community conflict, confusion over leadership and serious questions about the boundaries of the “community”. Processes aimed at redressing past injustice in disputes over conservation land, regardless of the approach adopted, must bring with them a strong commitment to building institutional and leadership capacities within communities, and pay serious attention to the ways in which equity and social justice can be fostered after the settlement of a land claim. Settlement agreements are frequently treated as the final step towards social justice, but are in fact just the beginning.     

Antecedents and consequences of empowering leadership: Leader power distance,leader perception of team capability,and team innovation

The evidence that empowering leadership is an effective form of team leadership brings the question on what the antecedents of empowering leadership are into focus. We propose that empowering leadership is driven by considerations of the normative and situational appropriateness of empowering leadership that are associated with leader power distance value and leader perception of team capability. We propose that leader power distance and perceived team capability interact such that the influence of leader power distance on empowering leadership is stronger with higher perceived team capability. We extend our model to show that by affecting empowering leadership, the interaction of leader power distance and perceived team capability indirectly influences team innovation, an important team outcome associated with empowered teamwork. We tested our model in two multisource surveys in China: Study 1 of 84 technical teams and Study 2 of 83 financial service teams. We discuss how our study contributes to empowering leadership theory by providing a theoretical perspective that lends itself well to identifying other trait and situational antecedents of empowering leadership.     

Team knowledge exchange: How and when does transformational leadership have an effect?

In this study, we examined how and when transformational leadership affected team knowledge exchange. Taking a goal pursuit perspective, we hypothesized two parallel mediating mechanisms—team knowledge goal generation and team knowledge goal striving—linking transformational leadership to team knowledge exchange. In addition, we investigated whether team-level team-member exchange served as a boundary condition that qualified the effects of transformational leadership on team knowledge goal generation and striving. We tested our hypotheses using time-lagged data from 118 work teams of a large Chinese manufacturing firm. Our findings provided support for the proposed parallel mediating mechanisms (i.e., team knowledge goal generation and team knowledge goal striving) that linked transformational leadership to team knowledge exchange. In addition, we found that team-level team-member exchange could strengthen the positive effect of transformational leadership on team knowledge exchange via team knowledge goal generation. By taking the novel lens of team goal pursuit, this study contributes to the literature on leadership and teams by shedding light on how transformational leadership triggers the goal pursuit process of team knowledge exchange.     

The consequences of (not) seeing eye-to-eye about the past: The role of supervisor–team fit in past temporal focus for supervisors' leadership behavior

This study seeks to advance our understanding of the leadership consequences that may ensue when supervisors and their teams have similar versus differing orientations toward the past. Integrating a leader–team fit perspective with functional leadership theory, we cast incongruence between supervisor and team past temporal focus as a key antecedent of supervisors' active (i.e., task-oriented and relationship-oriented) and passive (i.e., laissez-faire) leadership behaviors toward the team. We tested our hypotheses in a team-level study that included a field sample of 84 supervisors and their teams using polynomial regression and response surface analyses. Results illustrated that supervisors demonstrated more task-oriented and relationship-oriented leadership when supervisors' and their team's past temporal focus were incongruent rather than aligned. Furthermore, in situations of supervisor–team congruence, supervisors engaged in less task-oriented and relationship-oriented leadership and more laissez-faire leadership with higher (rather than lower) levels of supervisor and team past temporal focus. In sum, these findings support a complex (mis)fit model such that supervisors' attention to the past may hinder their productive leadership behaviors in some team contexts but not in others. Hence, this research advances a novel, multiple-stakeholder perspective on the role of both supervisors' and their team's past temporal focus for important leadership behaviors.