Abstract
Paternalistic leadership is one of the most representative topic in Chinese management research. It is rooted in the Chinese culture with a profound impact on the management of Chinese enterprises. As one component of paternalistic leadership with a close relationship with the Chinese traditional culture, authoritarian leadership shows popularity and adaptability in the Chinese enterprises. However, researchers have divergent viewpoints on the effectiveness of authoritarian leadership. A vast of empirical researches show that authoritarian leadership imposes a negative impact on the organization, team and employees. For example, authoritarian leadership would negatively affect team voice and employee task performance, etc. However, at the same time, other researchers have shown that authoritarian leadership is not always harmful, and it may impose a positive impact on the employee and the organization.
The author has been working as a human resource manager in small and medium-sized enterprises in China for a long time. For example, in the internal management style assessment found significant authoritative leadership behavior characteristics of the team leader, these team leaders in a city team to lead team members clear goals, the identification and implementation of specific action plans resulted in better performance results. Because the team leader performed well, the enterprise transferred him to another team as the team leader, or the previous management style and way to daily management, but found that, leading the new team did not lead to better performance results.
The same team leader led the team to produce different performance results, which also made the author interested in the research, the author found that under certain conditions, the relationship between authoritarian leadership and team performance can be both positive and negative.
Based on these two different viewpoints, this research is aim at figuring out the relationship between authoritarian leadership and team performance. Specifically, this research tries to elaborate whether there are two different paths between authoritarian leadership and team performance. On the one hand, I propose that authoritarian leadership could positively indirectly influence team performance through team goal clarity and team action process. Team power distance climate serves as a moderator in this process. This indirect relationship would be stronger if the team power distance climate is higher rather than lower. On the other hand, authoritarian leadership could negatively indirectly influence team performance through team voice and team knowledge integration. Team power distance climate serves as a moderator during the process. This relationship would be stronger if the team power distance climate is lower rather than higher.
To test the hypotheses, I recruited 557 team employees and their leaders from 125 teams to participate in the research. Survey data was collected at two time points. At time 1, employees reported authoritarian leadership, team goal clarity, team voice and team power distance climate. Two weeks later (time 2), team leaders reported team action process, team knowledge integration and team performance. After two-phase data collection, 377 team employees and 94 leaders provided complete information (94 teams).
In this research, I found: (1) there is no significant relationship between the authoritarian leadership and team performance through team goal clarity and team action process; (2) the indirect impact of authoritarian leadership on team performance (i.e. authoritarian leadership → clear team target → action process of team → team performance) is positively moderated by the power distance climate: the relationship would be stronger if the team power distance climate is higher rather than lower. (3) team voice and team knowledge integration are the consecutive mediators of the relationship between authoritarian leadership and team performance; (4) the indirect impact of authoritarian leadership on team performance (i.e. authoritarian leadership → team voice → team knowledge integration → team performance) is moderated by the team power distance climate: the relationship would be stronger if the team power distance climate is lower rather than higher.
This research contributes to literature in three ways. First, this research contributes to the authoritarian leadership through the exploration of the negative and positive impact of authoritarian leadership on team performance. The previous researches mainly focus on the negative impact of authoritarian leadership. Fewer researches find out its positive role, but there is still a lack of a balanced and dialectical understanding of authoritarian leadership. This research integrates the previous opinions to suggest that the impact of authoritarian leadership on team performance is both functional and dysfunctional. Authoritarian leadership would hurt team performance by reducing the team voice and team knowledge integration, but it may generate a positive impact on the team performance through increasing team goal clarity and team action process.
Second, this research reveals how and when authoritarian leadership will increase or decrease team performance. Authoritarian leadership may impose different impacts on team performance under different situations. Thus, to fully understand the effectiveness of authoritarian leadership, it is important to figure out when authoritarian leadership will lead to higher or lower team performance. In addition, revealing how and when authoritarian leadership will increase or decrease team performance is also helpful for us to have a better knowledge of the impact of authoritarian leadership on the team. By finding team power distance climate as a key boundary condition, this research elaborated when authoritarian leadership is link with higher team performance. On one hand, authoritarian leadership would increase team clarity and team action process, which would positively affect the team performance. On the other hand, authoritarian leadership would hinder team voice and team knowledge integration, which would impose a negative impact on the team performance.
Finally, this research contributes to the team effectiveness literature and reveals the positive impact of the negative leadership behavior (i.e., authoritarian leadership) under certain conditions. Previous literature focus on exploring how positive leadership behaviors improve team performance and how negative leadership behaviors lead to lower team performance. The study found that authoritarian leadership would bring a higher team performance under certain conditions, which provides a new perspective of the exploration on how leadership behaviors affect team performance.
Key Words: Authoritarian leadership, Team goal clarity, Team action process, Team voice; Team knowledge integration; Team performance; Team power distance climate