How Knowledge Worker Teams Deal Effectively with Task Uncertainty: The Impact of Transformational Leadership and Group Development

Validation of the German group development (GD) questionnaire

Group Development (GD) is an important variable when researching and evaluating what makes teams successful. We analyzed the psychometric properties of the originally Spanish GD questionnaire with German participants. 501 team members and 104 team leaders, 18 to 65 years old, from a German research organization answered an online survey composed of the GD questionnaire and items related to other group processes of democracy, mutual trust, team spirit, and interest in the team’s tasks. Results confirmed the unidimensional factor structure of the translated Spanish version for the German GD construct. Internal consistency, convergent and discriminant validity were good. The German GD correlated as expected to other constructs, and it showed concurrent validity with respect to the team members’ motivation and interest in team tasks (r = .79, p < .01). We recommend using the GD in German samples to measure team processes that are highly relevant for team effectiveness.

Transformational Leadership, Career Adaptability, and Work Behaviors: The Moderating Role of Task Variety

Career adaptability is a set of individual resources that benefit one’s sustainable development in his/her lifelong careers, especially in today’s turbulent environment. However, how to foster employees’ career adaptability through managerial strategies and eventually contribute to organizations remains to be studied. Guided by the career construction theory, we posit a moderated mediation model that transformational leadership (TFL) could strengthen employees’ career adaptability and further foster their task performance and organization-directed citizenship behavior (OCBO), with task variety moderating the mediation effect. We conducted a three-wave survey with 558 supervisor-employee dyads to test the overall model. The results validated that career adaptability mediated the links between TFL and task performance as well as OCBO. Furthermore, the mediation effect was stronger for employees who had higher levels of task variety. In short, our study offers the groundwork to understand that employees’ career adaptability can be activated by transformational leaders and is self-regulatory to benefit work behaviors in the task variety context. It enlightens organizations to cultivate employees’ career adaptability in the way of TFL and job design, with the objective of promoting the sustainable development for both the employees and the organizations.

How and When Do Leaders Influence Employees' Well-Being? Moderated Mediation Models for Job Demands and Resources

Following the call of recent reviews on leadership and well-being, the purpose of this study is to examine how and when two contrasting leadership styles, transformational leadership (TFL) and passive-avoidant leadership (PAL), are related to employees’ anxiety and thereby either promote or inhibit employees’ well-being. Using the prominent job demands-resources (JD-R) model as a theoretical framework, we propose that the relationship between leadership behavior and anxiety is mediated by organizational job demands, namely, role ambiguity (RA), and job resources, namely, team climate for learning (TCL), as well as moderated by autonomy as important job characteristic. A sample of 501 knowledge workers, working in teams in a German research and development (R&D) organization, answered an online survey. We tested moderated multiple mediation models using structural equation modeling (SEM). Results demonstrated that the relationships between TFL as well as PAL on the one hand and anxiety on the other hand were fully mediated by RA and TCL. Job autonomy moderated the quality of the leadership–job demand relationship for TFL and PAL. This paper contributes to understanding the complex relationship between leadership and followers’ well-being taking into account a combination of mediating and moderating job demands and resources. This is the first study that examines the effects of TFL and PAL on well-being taking into account the job demand RA and team processes and autonomy as resources.