Abstract
The purpose of the present study is the investigation of distributed leadership agency (DLA). DLA is an activity-based concept, which is defined as employees’ active participation in leadership tasks. By combining a descriptive and a normative approach DLA has the potential of real employee empowerment. It can protect from arbitrary managerial power and lead to employees’ personal development through sharing organizational resources, influencing leadership activities and joint decision making in companies. The study examines individually perceived autonomy as an antecedent and employees’ occupational self-efficacy as an outcome of DLA over time. Furthermore, the study tests the mediating role of DLA on the autonomy – self-efficacy relationship. The two-wave study applied an online survey in a Danish municipality with a time lag of seven months. We used regression analyses for testing the cross-sectional as well as cross-lagged relationships and an autoregressive model for analyzing the half-longitudinal mediation. The results revealed a significant positive effect of DLA on employees’ occupational self-efficacy cross-sectionally at Time 1 (n = 117) and Time 2 (n = 67), as well as cross-lagged (n = 67). The cross-sectional and cross-lagged findings also support a significant positive impact of autonomy on DLA. However, DLA only mediated the autonomy–self-efficacy relationship cross-sectionally, but not over time. Computed alternative causal models corroborate the proposed direction of our hypothesized relationships. These results provide first evidence that structural features such as autonomy are timely prior to action-related behavior (DLA), and that participating in leadership tasks enhances employees’ occupational self-efficacy.
Highlights
Collective forms of leadership such as distributed or shared leadership have gained much attention in organizational behavior literature (Denis et al 2012; D’Innocenzo et al 2014; Pearce et al 2014; Wang et al 2014)
The results of the analysis indicated that employees who participated in T1 and T2 (n = 67) had significantly higher initial values in distributed leadership agency (DLA) (t(115) = −2.65, p = .009, d = −0.50) and occupational self-efficacy (t(115) = −2.96, p = .004, d = −0.56) than those employees who did not respond at T2 (n = 50)
The current two-wave study investigated the concept of DLA and applied a normative approach by examining individual autonomy as an antecedent, occupational self-efficacy as an outcome and DLA as the mediator of the autonomy–self-efficacy relationship in the organizational context
Summary
Collective forms of leadership such as distributed or shared leadership have gained much attention in organizational behavior literature (Denis et al 2012; D’Innocenzo et al 2014; Pearce et al 2014; Wang et al 2014). DLA is the degree to which all employees individually experience being actively engaged in leadership activities within organizational change, managing tasks and strengthening social relations at work (Jønsson et al 2016) applying Yukl et al (2002) metacategories of leadership behavior. The added value of the presented DLA-construct in leadership literature is its humanistic potential to empower employees in the sense of real empowerment This empowerment is obtained not by delegating leadership tasks, rather it is a function of sharing organizational resources, influencing leadership activities, and by actively participating in decision-making within the company (Conger and Kanungo 1988). Woods and Gronn (2009); Woods and Woods (2013) point to the democratic potential of distributed leadership: it can protect against arbitrary use of managerial power, lead to personal development and promote democratic citizenship through the permeation of democratic practices and values in organizations ensuring employees’ basic human rights, such as dignity (McCall 2001; Pirson et al 2016)
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