Empowering and Directive Leadership: When Do They Improve Team Decision-Making?

Abstract

We contrast the effects of empowering and directive leadership on the accuracy and speed of emergency team decisions for routine vs. unfamiliar decision problems. In doing so, we advance a team leadership model of emergency decisions that (1) forwards distinct effects of empowering and directive leadership for two decision- making outcomes: accuracy and speed and (2) proposes decision task routineness as moderator of the effects of empowering and directive leadership on decision-making accuracy and speed. We test our theory with 72 teams using randomized experiments, the gold standard for establishing causality. We find that empowering leaders improve accuracy in unfamiliar emergencies whereas directive leaders improve accuracy in routine emergencies. In terms of decision-making speed, directive leadership brings about more speedy decisions than empowering leadership, especially in routine (vs. unfamiliar) decision-making tasks. These findings extend previous research by revealing hitherto undocumented boundaries to the benefits of empowering leadership. Our findings also contribute practical guidance to leaders and emergency management experts on the most effective behaviors for optimizing decision accuracy and speed of in routine and unfamiliar emergency situations.