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The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationships between team psychological safety and team performance and to test the mediating effect of learning orientation and moderating effect of psychological empowerment on that relationship.

Data were collected from 50 teams and 345 team members from 20 different organizations. The moderated mediation analysis of psychological empowerment was tested using hierarchical regression analysis (PROCESS Macro) in SPSS.

The results show that higher the psychological empowerment, higher is the effect of psychological safety and learning orientation on team performance. Results supported the moderated mediation analysis of psychological empowerment.

Given that psychological empowerment and learning orientation of team members will effect team performance, organizational efforts to foster psychological empowerment should be rewarding. Focusing on channelizing team psychological safety to improve team members’ relationship, openness and comfort with each other will increase team performance.

The study incorporated learning orientation and psychological empowerment to redefine the relationship between psychological safety and team performance.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between team empowerment and team proactivity and the moderating roles of a team leader's emotional intelligence (EI) and a team member's proactive personality.

To provide a rigorous test of the hypotheses, a field study from a sample of 910 certified nurses in 82 teams from 12 university hospitals in Turkey was conducted.

The results reveal that proactivity is positively associated with team empowerment. In addition, team leader's EI and team members' proactive personality influence the relationship between team empowerment and team proactivity. Specifically, teams exhibit the highest proactivity when team leaders' EI and team members' proactive personality are high.

The main strength of the investigation in this study was its multilevel research design. Most research on proactivity and empowerment has been conducted within single organizations, precluding an assessment of the way in which individual difference variables influence empowerment or proactivity. The multilevel design incorporated in this study, however, was capable of capturing the complexity of individual behaviors by considering different contexts.

In encouraging team proactivity, leadership and team members' personality characteristics do matter. Identifying individual difference variables such as team leader's EI, leader‐member exchange, locus of control or team members' personality help to advance the theoretical understanding of the team proactivity. This study provides evidence of the positive relationship between team empowerment and team proactivity. Such knowledge may help to search for continuous improvement and innovative solutions to work problems employed by healthcare administrators and potentially reduce the costs associated with losing high‐potential nurses.

This is one of the first studies to provide evidence of the moderating roles of the team leader's EI and team members' proactive personality levels on the relationship between team empowerment and team proactivity in university hospitals that formally implement work teams.

This paper aims to examine the impact of leadership style and team context on structural and psychological empowerment perceptions in project teams.

It was posited that span of control and within team interdependence will positively and significantly influence both structural and psychological empowerment. Person‐orientated leadership style was also expected to positively impact both structural and psychological empowerment while task orientated leadership style was expected to have a negative impact. These hypothesized relationships were examined using ordinary least squares (OLS) regression and hierarchical linear modelling (HLM) with data obtained through a parallel quantitative questionnaire survey of construction client, consultant and contractor organizations in Hong Kong.

No significant relationship was found between span of control and any facet of empowerment while team interdependence had a positive and significant relationship with psychological empowerment but not structural empowerment. Task‐orientated leadership was positively and significantly related to psychological empowerment in the full sample and contractor teams but not in consultant and client teams. Person‐orientated leadership was positively and significantly related to psychological empowerment in the full sample, consultant and client teams but not in contractor teams.

The link between leadership style, team context and three facets of empowerment are examined compared with previous studies often focusing on one facet. Sub‐sample analysis enabled more subtle differences of the impact of leadership style in different context to be revealed, an indication that samples may not be homogeneous.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of employee empowerment on team performance in the context of municipal work teams. Four different dimensions of employee empowerment are identified: autonomy, responsibility, information, and creativity.

Using a survey of 176 US municipal government employees, this study conducted an OLS multiple regression analysis. The study regressed the dependent variable, team performance, on the four independent variables: autonomy, responsibility, information, and creativity.

The regression analysis provided empirical evidence in support of the four hypotheses proposed in this study. The study reveals that autonomy, responsibility, information, and creativity each have positive and significant effects on team performance.

The study suggests that employee empowerment programs should consider different dimensions of empowerment. At least, managers need to keep in mind the four dimensions of empowerment discussed in this research. Understanding different dimensions of empowerment will enable managers to design and implement a successful empowerment program.

Prior research focused on developing conceptual models of the multiple dimensions of empowerment. This paper took one step further and provided empirical evidence.

To survive in an increasingly competitive environment, companies today are searching for innovative ways to enhance the creative potential of their workforce. Like total quality management (TQM) and re‐engineering, empowerment has become a 1990s mantra. Yet empowerment in practice is more than just a current buzzword: it is a significant leadership challenge. To confront this challenge, we have developed the Empowerment Strategy Grid, an assessment tool which can help companies avoid the implementation pitfalls associated with group differences, variations in the definition and degree of empowerment across an organization, and human‐resource interventions which unintentionally disempower. Comprehensively describes the Empowerment Strategy Grid and its practical application in facilitating a leading US multinational’s transition to empowered work teams and potential achievement of empowerment benefits. Also presents implications for companies managing similar change.

Based on extant literature on empowerment and team management, this paper aims to examine the effect of power distance and collectivism on the relationship between empowerment and team performance through the mechanisms of knowledge sharing and intra-group conflict.

This paper conceptualizes a model depicting the relationship between team empowerment and team performance across cultures.

The authors argue that team empowerment can increase both knowledge sharing and intra-group conflict in working teams. Knowledge sharing facilitates team performance, while intra-group conflict impairs team performance in the long run. Team empowerment yields different team performance across cultures due to the respective moderating effects of power distance and collectivism.

This paper explicates the moderating roles of power distance and collectivism on the relationship between empowerment, knowledge sharing, intra-group conflict and team performance. The authors suggest that the effectiveness of team empowerment is contingent on the cultural context that the team operates in.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of project settings on empowerment experiences of individuals and teams by examining the effects of specific project characteristics on facets of the empowerment concept (i.e. the structural and psychological perspectives).

A parallel questionnaire survey of client, consultant and contractor organisations was conducted in Hong Kong to test hypotheses relating three facets of the empowerment concept and five project-level antecedents. Hierarchical linear modelling and ordinary least square regression were employed to test the hypotheses.

The analyses show that dynamic project environments, high project team integration and high interdependence of project tasks lead to high individual psychological empowerment, while public-client projects (compared with private-client projects), a hostile project environment and high client integration lead to a low individual psychological empowerment. Uncertainty in project technology also leads to high team psychological empowerment, while hostile project environments lead to low team psychological empowerment. Further, dynamic project environments lead to more empowering work climate, while hostile project environments lead to less empowering work climate. However, project team integration, project complexity, project lifecycle and quasi-public-client projects (compared with private-client projects) have no significant association with the empowerment of individuals and teams.

This study examined task-related factors (i.e. project in this case) which traditionally have not been the focus of studies examining the antecedents of empowerment. Further, project-level antecedents and their link to an integrated perspective of empowerment comprising a sociostructural perspective, a psychological perspective and a team-based perspective are examined, which is a significant departure from the unitary perspective of empowerment taken in most previous studies.

Quality empowering management is to the future of renewed worldwide competitiveness what quality control, participative management programmes and zero defects were to quality improvement. Empowerment holds that promoting employee involvement empowers workers to perform as whole, thinking human beings. Empowerment is the glue by which the elements of customer focus, quality process and products, continuous improvements, self‐managing teams, quality measurement, and utilization of the total workforce abilities are held together. Self‐managing teams are one of the major keys in the innovative organization to solving complex problems, increasing productivity, and heightening creativity. For most organizations and managers, quality empowering management is a new responsibility and a radical change in style of management and change in culture requiring new methods and systems.

The purpose of this article is to investigate transformational leadership in relation to empowerment and team effectiveness. As part of an integrative model of leadership, transformational leadership style of superiors is proposed to be related to the strength of subordinate empowerment and team effectiveness. A total of 152 employees from various industries rated their superiors’ transformational leadership behaviors and also how much they felt empowered. They also evaluated their teams’ effectiveness in terms of innovativeness, communication and team performance. Findings suggest that transformational leadership contributes to the prediction of subordinates’ self‐reported empowerment and that the more a team’s members experience team empowerment, the more effective the team will be.

Based on a four-factor leadership typology, this theoretical chapter proposes four alternative models to investigate how collaborative capital moderates the relationships between leadership and innovation. Beyerlein, Beyerlein, and Kennedy (2004) define collaborative capital as “how well people work together toward shared goals and outcomes.” In this chapter, we focus on empowerment as an important manifestation of collaborative capital. That is, first, empowerment enhances collaboration across vertical hierarchical lines through sharing of decision-making authority. Also, since empowerment is typically implemented as a team form of organizational structure, empowered teams enhance collaboration through the process of decentralized team decision-making. Thus, the accumulation of successful empowerment and the qualities of empowered team member represent the collaborative capital. Specifically, the models suggest that empowerment may function as a partial mediator, or as a moderator, or as both, in the basic relationship between transformational leadership and innovation. In addition, although transformational leadership and empowering leadership elicit different attitudes and behaviors of team members that may facilitate innovation, the interactions between these outcomes will maximize the effects of leadership on innovation. The implications of these observations and the possible directions for future research are discussed.