Directive versus Participative Leadership: Dispositional Antecedents and Team Consequences

Abstract

Directive and participative leadership are two fundamental sets of behaviors leaders employ to manage teams, yet little is known about the antecedents. Drawn on regulatory mode theory, we propose that team leaders high in locomotion orientation, defined as a dispositional propensity to control movements and carry the action forward, prefer directive leadership to “keep moving”, while team leaders high in assessment orientation, defined as another dispositional propensity to compare between means and options, prefer participative leadership to “get the best”. Moreover, we further hypothesize that directive leadership increases team efficiency but decreases team creativity, whereas participative leadership increases team creativity but decreases team efficiency. Using multi- source and time-lagged data from 75 management consulting project teams, regression and bootstrapping results provided support to most of the hypotheses. Supplementary analysis revealed that participative leadership had a U-shaped relationship with team efficiency when directive leadership is low. We discuss implications to the leadership, regulatory mode, and team literature.