Cailing Feng, Lisan Fan and Xiaoyu Huang
This study aims to break through the limitations of previous studies that have focused too much on the individual-level effects of humble leadership. Based on the affective events…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to break through the limitations of previous studies that have focused too much on the individual-level effects of humble leadership. Based on the affective events theory (AET), this study provides to construct an individual-team multilevel model of humble leadership focusing on the followers’ affective reaction and attribution of intentionality.
Design/methodology/approach
On the basis of subordinates’ attribution of humble leadership, it is believed that there are actually two motivations for humble leadership: true intention (serve the organizational collective interest) and pseudo intention (serve the leader’s self-interest), to which subordinates have different affective reactions, causing different leadership effectiveness. Thus, this study conducted an extensive review based on the qualitative method and proposed an integrated multilevel model of leader humility on individual and team outputs.
Findings
Followers’ attribution of intentionality moderates the relationship between humble leadership and followers’ affective reaction, which also determines followers’ performance (task performance, interpersonal deviant behavior and leader–member exchange); the interaction between team leaders’ humble leadership and collective attribution of intentionality influences team outputs (team outputs, organizational deviant behavior and team–member exchange) through team affective reaction; team humble leadership affects individual outputs through affective reaction and team affective climate plays a moderating role between affective reaction and individual outputs.
Originality/value
This study explores the individual-team multilevel outputs of humble leadership based on the AET theory, which is relatively rare in the current field. This study attempts to incorporate leaders’ motivation (such as attributions of intentionality) into the humble leadership research, by confirming that humble leadership affects affective reaction, which further influences individual-team multilevel outputs.
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Cailing Feng, Xiaoyu Huang and Lihua Zhang
Based on dual organizational theory, the purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between transformational leadership and innovative behavior in groups. The authors…
Abstract
Purpose
Based on dual organizational theory, the purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between transformational leadership and innovative behavior in groups. The authors proposed that group innovative behavior was influenced by transformational leadership as a group-level construct which was moderated by dual organizational change that represent organization-level resources. Furthermore, the authors identified two organizational change-related situational variables-radical change and incremental change and examined their effects on group innovative behavior.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors collected data from full-time employees working in groups in 43 companies, located in five cities in China including Beijing, Yantai, Chengdu, Xi’an, and Chengde. These enterprises were from a wide range of industries, including manufacturing, financing, information technology, and geological exploration. The authors chose a middle- or senior-level manager from each company to act as chief survey respondent, who were asked to contact managers and employees from a list they had provided and invite them to participate in a web-based survey (via an e-mailed link) or a paper-and-pencil survey. A total of 192 managers and 756 direct subordinates from 112 groups completed the survey.
Findings
Results found that transformational leadership was positively related to group innovative behavior, and this relationship was moderated by radical change, but not incremental change; radical change and incremental change were also positively related to group innovative behavior.
Research limitations/implications
This study adopts a cross-sectional study design, which is insufficient for deriving causal inferences. Future research may adopt a longitudinal study design to investigate causal impacts. Besides, some unmeasured variables could be related to transformational leadership and innovative behavior.
Practical implications
The paper includes implications for adopting appropriate leadership style to motivate innovative behavior, promoting dual organizational change to boost innovative behavior, and generating greater innovative behavior for transformational leaders in times of radical change.
Originality/value
This cross-level study contributes to the relationship between transformational leadership and group innovative behavior in the context of dual organizational change.
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Xiaoyu Huang, Lihua Zhang, Cailing Feng and Craig Richard Seal
The current study aims to investigate the temporal mechanisms in HRM systems by focusing on how HRM systems evolve over time and how such changes affect organizational innovation.
Abstract
Purpose
The current study aims to investigate the temporal mechanisms in HRM systems by focusing on how HRM systems evolve over time and how such changes affect organizational innovation.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper draws on organizational entrainment theory to examine how pace of change in employee involvement programs (EIPs) influences innovation via data from an eight-year longitudinal survey collected by Statistics Canada. The final sample includes 15,679 workplace–year observations.
Findings
This research shows that the effects of HRM programs on performance are more than just the mean effect – the pace of change by which changes are implemented in HRM programs matters in the long run. The optimal level of change pace occurs when the EIPs are changing at a pace that entrains (or synchronizes) with organizational rhythm of strategic changes. Results suggest that change pace in EIPs has an inverted-U-shaped relationship with both pace and quality of innovation. The curvilinear effect is more pronounced for organizations with relatively lower mean level of EIPs.
Research limitations/implications
First, this study captures only key measures of the EIPs and may not be generalizable to other dimensions of the HR systems. Second, the results of this paper should be interpreted at the HR program level or bundles of HR practices – the findings may not be generalizable to lower levels of analysis. Third, as a result of annual measurement, this study cannot capture short-lived minor dynamic HR misfits where workplaces quickly adjust to regain alignment. Fourth, to attain meaningful and consistent measures of strategic HR change, this study only includes surviving workplaces with at least five years of observations.
Practical implications
This paper provides insights to managers and business leaders on how to implement strategic changes in HRM systems effectively to attain sustained innovation outcomes in the long run. To achieve an optimal level of innovation, organizations need to consider not only what and how many EIPs should be used but also how to strategically change EIPs to meet dynamic internal and external changes.
Originality/value
The current research introduces organizational entrainment theory to explain and empirically test the conflicting predictions of the universalist and contingency perspectives on the effects of strategic changes in HRM.
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Lisan Fan, Cailing Feng, Mulyadi Robin and Xiaoyu Huang
Transformational leadership and service performance of civil servants greatly affect the government’s administrative effectiveness. However, there are few studies on the influence…
Abstract
Purpose
Transformational leadership and service performance of civil servants greatly affect the government’s administrative effectiveness. However, there are few studies on the influence mechanism of transformational leadership on service performance in the context of public organizations. Based on the social exchange theory, this study aims to construct and examine the dual path mediating process of affective trust and cognitive trust for the effects of transformational leadership on service performance.
Design/methodology/approach
Drawing from 268 supervisor–subordinate dyads civil servants at the municipal level in China across three waves.
Findings
Both affective trust and cognitive trust partly mediated the relationships between transformational leadership and service performance, which supported the underlying theoretical mechanism of social exchange theory and transformational leadership theory in explaining the dual relationship between leaders and subordinates. This study innovatively and empirically examined the effects of transformational leadership on service performance through dual trust in civil servants in China, thus bridging the gap in this knowledge.
Originality/value
This study innovatively and empirically examined the effects of transformational leadership on service performance through dual trust in civil servants in China, thus bridging the gap in this knowledge.
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Cailing Feng, Mulyadi Robin, Lisan Fan and Xiaoyu Huang
Commitment to change is vital for the success of any organizational change initiative. However, despite a sustained increase in research interest on employees’ commitment to…
Abstract
Purpose
Commitment to change is vital for the success of any organizational change initiative. However, despite a sustained increase in research interest on employees’ commitment to change, there is still no consistency about the unidimensional or multi-dimensional construct of commitment to change, and previous research tends to ignore the impact vocational drivers may have on it. The paper aims to discuss these issues.
Design/methodology/approach
Drawing on prospect theory, the authors extended Herscovitch and Meyer’s (2002) commitment to change construct by developing and testing an additional dimension of commitment to change centered on employees’ vocational commitment across two studies, adopting a longitudinal design within a Chinese context. As organizational change often has implications that impacts individual decision making, vocational development and work adjustments and attitudes within the workplace, the authors presented the case for vocational commitment to change as an important extension to the commitment to change literature. The authors first provided evidence for the internal consistency, factor structure and the validity of the commitment to change in the Chinese context. Subsequently, the authors examined the changes of employees’ commitment to change across time, and demonstrated its predictive validity by exploring the relationship between commitment to change and change-related behaviors.
Findings
The current research represents improvements in commitment to change measurement, provides construct clarification in the Asia context, and sheds light on theoretical and empirical evidence for how to support change in the Chinese context. Limitations, implications and directions for future research are further discussed.
Originality/value
The current study responds to a call for research to further investigate the mechanisms of commitment to change within non-Western contexts, specifically within the Chinese context. Through a rigorous scale development process, the authors clarified Herscovitch and Meyer’s (2002) commitment to change model and present an augmented model with a fourth dimension –vocational commitment to change. Furthermore, through a longitudinal study, the current study also demonstrates that the cultivation of commitment to change has great importance to improving employees’ change-supportive behavior and reducing their resistance to change. This is consistent with cross-cultural research, which shows that Chinese individuals are more likely to possess inconsistent attitudes toward an object, including themselves, compared to Western individuals (Spencer-Rodgers et al., 2004). The study also explained the change of commitment to change over time, showing the significant relationships among the commitment to change and change-related behaviors.
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Cailing Wang, Chunxia Zhao and Jingyu Yang
Positioning is a key task in most field robotics applications but can be very challenging in GPS‐denied or high‐slip environments. The purpose of this paper is to describe a…
Abstract
Purpose
Positioning is a key task in most field robotics applications but can be very challenging in GPS‐denied or high‐slip environments. The purpose of this paper is to describe a visual odometry strategy using only one camera in country roads.
Design/methodology/approach
This monocular odometery system uses as input only those images provided by a single camera mounted on the roof of the vehicle and the framework is composed of three main parts: image motion estimation, ego‐motion computation and visual odometry. The image motion is estimated based on a hyper‐complex wavelet phase‐derived optical flow field. The ego‐motion of the vehicle is computed by a blocked RANdom SAmple Consensus algorithm and a maximum likelihood estimator based on a 4‐degrees of freedom motion model. These as instantaneous ego‐motion measurements are used to update the vehicle trajectory according to a dead‐reckoning model and unscented Kalman filter.
Findings
The authors' proposed framework and algorithms are validated on videos from a real automotive platform. Furthermore, the recovered trajectory is superimposed onto a digital map, and the localization results from this method are compared to the ground truth measured with a GPS/INS joint system. These experimental results indicate that the framework and the algorithms are effective.
Originality/value
The effective framework and algorithms for visual odometry using only one camera in country roads are introduced in this paper.