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Drawing on power approach-inhibition theory, this study develops a conditional indirect effect model to explore how team vertical leader position and expert power indirectly impact members’ shared leadership through vertical leader’s empowering behaviors.

Multi-source data was collected using a field survey research design. The final sample includes 944 employees in 164 teams from 14 companies in China.

This study found that the interaction of team vertical leader position power and expert power was positively related to their empowering behaviors, which in turn were positively associated with shared leadership. Moreover, our post hoc-analysis revealed the moderating effect of team power distance orientation on the relationship between vertical leader empowering behaviors and shared leadership.

This study sheds light on shared leadership literature by examining vertical leader position and expert power as antecedents. We also offer new directions for exploring how power functions by discussing leadership through the lens of power approach-inhibition theory.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of inclusive leadership on team climate. Drawing on the social exchange theory (SET), this study proposes a theoretical model in which (1) inclusive leadership enhances team climate, (2) the moderating effect of team power distance and trust in leadership in the relationship between inclusive leadership and team climate.

A quantitative research method was applied, with a survey of 247 Nigerian employees nested in 59 teams in multiple small manufacturing firms across diverse industries widely distributed into textile, furniture, bakery and palm oil production firms. The partial least square structural equation modelling was used to test the study's proposed hypotheses.

The results revealed that inclusive leadership has a positive and direct effect on team climate. Also, this study found that (1) team power distance positively influences the relationship between inclusive leadership and team climate; and (2) trust in leadership positively influences the relationship between inclusive leadership and team climate.

This study affirms the explanatory power of SET to investigate inclusive leadership and team climate at the team level. Also, the study utilised the SET to confirm the significance and value of team power distance and trust in leadership in the relationship between inclusive leadership and team climate at the team level in the Nigerian context.

The paper examined the relationship between inclusive leadership and team climate with team power distance and trust in leadership as moderators. The findings suggest that inclusive leadership play a paramount role in understanding team climate among small manufacturing firms. Moreover, the findings can be applied in organisations by creating different assessment mechanisms, e.g. webinars and training sessions, to encourage effective inclusive leadership behaviours in fostering a team climate for creativity and innovation.

The main contribution of this current research to knowledge is on the examination of the distinctive leadership style that influences team climate. The study indicates that when team members are allowed to fully contribute to the team, inclusion is promoted among group members, and trust in leadership is strengthened, which increases their perception of team climate within organisations.

This paper aims to understand the effects of team power asymmetry (hierarchy) on team learning.

Literature suggests that power asymmetry can hurt team learning due to unequal interactions. The authors integrate the situated focus theory of power and the theory of adversarial growth to propose that environmental hardship can moderate this relationship. Such that, under environmental hardship there is a shift in power relations within hierarchical teams, such that power asymmetry positively relates to team learning via increased team egalitarianism (interactional equality).

The study is presented in two parts. Part 1 reviews the literature and builds the theoretical arguments for the conceptual model, while Part 2 empirically examines the model on a sample of military teams. In Part 1, the authors propose a theoretically derived model and directions for future research in team power, dynamics and learning.

It provides directions to empirically validate a contingency-based model to resolve the dilemma of creating equality and high levels of team learning in hierarchical teams.

The conceptual model and hypotheses contribute to the team learning literature by theoretically clarifying the conditions under which power asymmetry is likely to improve team learning.

Based on the social dominance theory, this study aims to theorize the moderating effect of power disparity in the impact of team knowledge variety on team creativity and further to verify team open communication as the mediating mechanism of the aforementioned interactive effect.

The multisource (team members and their team leaders) and longitudinal (separated by four months) survey data were collected from 67 research and development teams in China to test the research model. The authors used multiple regression analyses to validate all the proposed hypotheses.

Results reveal that team knowledge variety has a more positive impact on team creativity when teams have lower power disparity. Besides, team open communication is significantly and positively related to team creativity and mediates the interactive effect of team knowledge variety and team power disparity on team creativity.

This study reconciles the mixed findings in the previous study and provides new insights regarding the functionality of team knowledge variety. By identifying team power disparity as a moderator in shaping the effects of team knowledge variety, the authors extend the research that explores the moderators of the team knowledge variety–team creativity relationship, and make comprehensive consideration of the coexistence of multiple diversities within teams (i.e. knowledge variety and power disparity) and their joint effects on team creativity. Besides, this research identifies team open communication as an important underlying mechanism in transmitting the interactive effects of two different types of diversities on team creativity, thus offering new insights on how teams can perform creatively.

To facilitate innovative software development, more and more software development teams (SDTs) turn to agile methods. Such agile methods develop both extensive and efficient software responses to a client’s requirement change. However, the antecedents of successful agile software development are poorly understood. The authors goal is to propose a model of how power asymmetry and paradoxical leadership interact and affect agility in SDTs, which in turn affect their capacity to innovate. By leveraging insights from research on individuals’ cognition, the authors argue that developers with relatively higher power evaluate their contributions to their teams more ambivalently, which increases their delay or postponement of their contributions to their teams’ tasks. As a result, power asymmetry is negatively related to software teams’ response extensiveness and efficiency. Second, and drawing on leadership studies on behavioral complexity, the authors consider the moderating role of paradoxical leadership that a team receives as an important moderating factor to this effect. The authors argue that, when team leaders exhibit paradoxical leadership behaviors, high-power individuals’ ambivalence is less likely to emerge; hence, transforming power asymmetry to an asset for the enhancement of agility in the SDT.

The field of Human Resource Management (HRM) has long recognized the importance of interpersonal influence for employee and organizational effectiveness. HRM research and practice have focused primarily on individuals’ characteristics and behaviors as a means to understand “who” is influential in organizations, with substantially less attention paid to social networks. To reinvigorate a focus on network structures to explain interpersonal influence, the authors present a comprehensive account of how network structures enable and constrain influence within organizations. The authors begin by describing how power and status, two key determinants of individual influence in organizations, operate through different mechanisms, and delineate a range of network positions that yield power, reflect status, and/or capture realized influence. Then, the authors extend initial structural views of influence beyond the positions of individuals to consider how network structures within and between groups – capturing group social capital and/or shared leadership – enable and constrain groups’ ability to influence group members, other groups, and the broader organizational system. The authors also discuss how HRM may leverage these insights to facilitate interpersonal influence in ways that support individual, group, and organizational effectiveness.

This paper aims to clarify under which conditions, and via what mechanisms, power asymmetry is likely to affect team learning. This work is part of a two-paper series. Part I presents the theoretical arguments linking power asymmetry to team learning via egalitarianism and the moderating role of environmental hardship. In Part II, the authors provide an empirical evaluation of the conceptual model presented in Part I.

Data was gathered on 4,637 military personnel nested in 143 ongoing teams. Multiple regression analysis was used to analyze the proposed moderated mediation model. The results show that under higher levels of environmental hardship, teams with higher power asymmetry (greater hierarchy) show greater team egalitarianism and higher team learning.

The results show that under higher levels of environmental hardship, teams with higher power asymmetry (greater hierarchy) show greater team egalitarianism and higher team learning.

The empirical examination of the proposed relationships is based on a large sample of military teams in the real world. Future research would benefit from testing the model on different samples across industries and adopting different operationalizations for environmental hardship relevant to each industry.

This work provides insights to help practitioners to preserve the coordination benefits of hierarchy, while still promoting more egalitarianism and team learning in hierarchical teams.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the influencing mechanism of servant leadership on employee and team creativity based on efficacy theory. Specifically, the study intends to develop a model of efficacy beliefs that mediates the relationships between servant leadership, employee creativity, and team creativity at different levels. The study also aims to investigate the moderating effects of team power distance on the relationships between servant leadership, creative self-efficacy, and team efficacy at both individual and team levels.

Servant leadership, employee creativity, creative self-efficacy, team creativity, team efficacy, and team power distance were assessed in an empirical study based on a sample of 466 employees and 83 team leaders from 11 banks in China.

From efficacy theory perspective, this paper finds that servant leadership promotes employee creative self-efficacy and team efficacy, which enables the simultaneous promotion of employee creativity and team creativity. Team power distance also moderates the relationship between servant leadership and team efficacy.

The results suggest that it is important to encourage managers to engage in servant leader behaviors, which is conductive to enhancing employees’ self-efficacy beliefs and thereby improving creative outcomes of employees. The results are also helpful for managers to enhance their understanding of the differences in cultural values in management behavior and the effects of behavior on team efficacy.

The research findings provide a significant contribution to the literature in that it shows self-efficacy as a crucial mediating mechanism through which servant leadership influences creativity at individual and team levels. Moreover, the findings support the view that power distance is an important contextual factor that affects the influencing mechanism of servant leadership on team creativity. Furthermore, this paper is one of the few studies answering the call to examine the effect of leadership at multiple levels.

This study aims to look at the interaction dynamics among engineering professionals from the lens of status hierarchies and derive on the role of intragroup conflicts prevalent in engineering teams. It develops and tests a comprehensive moderated-mediation model combining interpersonal status dynamics (of talent and conflicts prevalent within the team) with team external power dynamics (with other teams) and their resultant effect on team performance through the intragroup conflicts.

Data at team level from 1,265 members belonging to 218 engineering teams were used for hypothesis testing.

Process and status conflicts fully explain the negative effect of having more talented members in teams on team performance. High talented teams have lower levels of process and status conflicts and higher levels of performance when they have high power.

This paper contributes to the literature on engineering teams, team status, power and conflicts.

This paper advises manager on where to exactly look for problems in the internal working of talented teams and conditions that could negatively impact their performance.

Research on teams’ internal composition and team performance link remains inconclusive. The established pattern of thinking in both practice and research is that having more talented members in the engineering teams is attached to superior performance. Whereas it is often the case that even after having multiple talented members, teams are not able to perform well. With some exceptions, studies have not paid attention to the dynamics of having more talented members and its flip side on team performance.

This study aims to examine how changes in power disparity shape in-groups and upper-level management conflict are associated with intragroup relationship and task conflict variations. It also examines how workplace conflicts relate to focal employees’ perceptions of coworker support.

Data were collected from 3,343 respondents for nine years, comprising measurements taken on six occasions in 47 departments and stores of a Canadian retailer. The relationships between, within and across levels were tested using multilevel structural equation modeling.

The results showed that higher levels of power concentration vested by a few members or a single person are associated wih higher levels of intragroup conflict than usual. Furthermore, higher levels of task and relationship conflicts at upper management levels are associated with higher-than-usual task and relationship conflicts between nonhierarchical employees. Additionally, a higher-than-usual intragroup task conflict level was associated with lower-than-usual coworker support, supporting the proposed multilevel dynamic model.

An important limitation of this study is that all variables are self-reported despite using the six-wave repeated measurements, thereby increasing the possibility of inflating some observed relationships. Future research should examine the emergence of a larger spectrum of power dispersion configurations and their role on process conflict.

Retail managers should legitimize why a high-power concentration occurs when the equal distribution of power is not possible and find ways to minimize the trickle-down effects of conflicts at upper levels on their subordinates.

This study examines the effect of variability on power configurations and conflict in upper management ranks on conflict dynamic. The findings show that a high-power concentration elicits increasing conflicts, and that there is no empirical evidence that intragroup conflict is associated with positive outcomes.