Leadership and Team-Regulation Effects on Performance

Abstract

This dissertation is about the regulation of behavior in the organizational domain. The aim of the following three research papers was to identify potential obstacles to effective performance as a precondition for people to apply supportive regulatory strategies (Paper I and Paper III) and to show how people overcome these obstacles and perform effectively (Paper II). I reflected on the self-regulation strategy implementation intentions in tandem with leadership to identify and overcome obstacles to effective performance. The focus of the first paper was a prototype analysis on the emotion concept of envy in two studies. My coauthors and I systematically differentiated between envy in three different Western cultures by mapping their internal structures, their constitutive features, and their degree of overlap with regards to the same emotion in different countries. Taken together, the results confirmed that a prototype approach is useful to study the internal structure of emotions on a cross-cultural level and to unraveling their constitutive features and degree of overlap with regards to the same emotion in different countries. While the first paper revealed which features constitute envy and thereby led to a greater understanding when envy could be a potential obstacle to effective performance, the second paper demonstrated how the regulation of team behavior with the use of transactional leadership and implementation intentions improved team performance in a hidden profile task. My coauthors and I assumed that teams in the intervention group that focused on the regulation of team behavior had a higher decision quality in hidden profile tasks, compared to those in the control group that received no intervention. The results of an experimental study revealed a significant difference between the intervention and control teams. Descriptively, teams with leaders solved more hidden profiles than teams in the control group, but implementation intentions on its own or in tandem with leadership were the most efficient team strategy to solve hidden profile problems. In conclusion, the application of regulation strategies in the second paper expanded the findings of the research in the first paper, indicating that the regulation of behavior through transactional leadership and implementation intentions are efficient means to improve team performance in the organizational context. Finally, the third paper identified age stereotypes towards older subordinates as potential obstacles for younger leaders, when they evaluate the performance of older subordinates. In a field study, my coauthors and I investigated how the direction of age dissimilarities in these non-traditional leader-subordinate constellations influenced performance evaluations of subordinates. Drawing on the shifted-standard model of stereotype-based judgements, we hypothesized and found that leader-subordinate age dissimilarity effects are asymmetrical and positively related to performance evaluations in non-traditional leader-subordinate constellations. In sum, the three papers suggest that people perform effectively with leadership and implementation intentions, and that envy as well as age differences potentially act as obstacles to effective performance outcomes in the organizational context and thus may need to be regulated.