2012 Awards for Excellence

Citation

Liu, J. (2013), "2012 Awards for Excellence", Nankai Business Review International, Vol. 4 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/nbri.2013.46704aaa.001

2012 Awards for Excellence

Article Type: 2012 Awards for Excellence From: Nankai Business Review International, Volume 4, Issue 1

The following article was selected for this year's Outstanding Paper Award for Nankai Business Review International

“Leader political skill and team performance: a moderated mediation model”

Jun Liu, Wei Wang and Kun-peng CaoSchool of Business, Renmin University of China, Beijing, People's Republic of China

Purpose – Drawing on the political theory of leadership and the input-process-output model the purpose of this paper is to examine the link between leader political skill and team performance by focusing on the mediating role of team communication and the moderating role of team task interdependence.

Design/methodology/approach – The authors collected three waves of data from 80 teams across four business units and employed hierarchical regression modeling and the moderated path analysis approach suggested by Edwards and Lambert to test the moderated mediation model.

Findings – Leader political skill was found to positively influence team performance via promoting the quality of team communication. Moreover, team task interdependence moderates the relationship between leader political skill and team communication, such that the relationship is stronger when team task interdependence is high rather than low.

Research limitations/implications – First, the paper adopts the measuring scales developed in the western organizational context to investigate the relations and phenomena existing in the Chinese organizational context. Future research should adopt the indigenous measuring scales to investigate the relations and phenomena existing in the Chinese organizational context. Second, both political skill and team performance were reported by the team leader, which might lead to common source bias. Future research should allow team members to rate leaders' political skill and the team leaders' supervisors to provide evaluation of team performance.

Practical implications – Owing to its importance to team performance, political skill is one of the critical skills that leaders should make efforts to develop. When companies recruit leaders for work teams, they should put more attention on the political skills of the candidates. Moreover, companies should cultivate a cooperative team climate to facilitate team communication.

Originality/value – Although Ahearn et al. suggested that leader political skill has positive effect on team performance, they did not empirically examine the specific process and mechanism through which the positive effect occurs. This study argues team communication is a critical mechanism that bridges leader political skill and team operations and outcomes as well. The study adopts longitudinal research design and collects multi-source data to test the authors' model. The study also complements past research by investigating both the mediating and moderating mechanisms in the leader political-team performance linkage.

Keywords Communication skills, Leadership, Team leaders, Team performance, Team working

www.emeraldinsight.com/10.1108/20408741111113475

This article originally appeared in Volume 2 Numbers 1, 2011, pp. 5-22 Nankai Business Review International

The following article was selected for this year's Highly Commended Award

“Cross listing, corporate governance and corporate performance: empirical evidence of Hong Kong-listed Chinese companies”

Zhou Jian, Zhang Tingting and Cui Shengchao

This article originally appeared in Volume 2 Number 3, 2011, Nankai Business Review International

Outstanding Reviewer

Professor Wu BingEast China University of Science and Technology, People's Republic of China