Empowerment contagion in project teams 11-Repository.pdf (257.84 kB)
Do you feel what I feel? Empowerment contagion in project teams
conference contribution
posted on 2013-01-24, 11:47 authored by Martin TuuliMartin Tuuli, Sylvia AcquahPsychological empowerment, described as constellation of experienced cognitions manifested as sense of meaning, competence, impact, and self-determination has been
identified as an important motivating force in teams with performance consequences
for individuals and teams. Prior research have therefore sort to identify factors from
the individual-, team-, project- and organisation-levels that impact empowerment
cognitions with the hope of providing concrete targets for promoting psychological
empowerment. One constituency that has been overlooked is the likelihood that
psychological empowerment in teams may be capable of being transmitted from one
team member to another. This paper reports a study investigating whether
psychological empowerment cognition in project teams is contagious. Using survey
responses from 380 individuals, nested in 115 project management teams, we test the
psychological empowerment contagion hypothesis using analysis of variance,
interrater agreement and hierarchical linear modelling as proxies. Analysis of variance
indicates that the between-team variance of team psychological empowerment is
statistically significant and substantially larger than the within-team variance. Several
measures of interrator agreement also show considerable agreement (consensus)
within teams, further confirming the prevalence of psychological empowerment in
teams. Team psychological empowerment also has a significant positive and
independent impact on individual psychological empowerment, even after controlling
for the impact of variables previously identified as influencing psychological
empowerment. Team members who reported higher levels of team psychological
empowerment were also more likely to experience higher levels of individual
psychological empowerment themselves. Psychological empowerment is contagious
and can be transmitted from one team member to another. These findings supplement
the traditional sources of antecedents of empowerment and suggest that team
members play an important multiplier role in engendering feelings of psychological
empowerment both consciously and unconsciously.
History
School
- Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering
Citation
TUULI, M.M. and ACQUAH, S., 2012. Do you feel what I feel? Empowerment contagion in project teams. IN: Smith, S.D. (ed.) Proceedings of the 28th Annual ARCOM Conference, Edinburgh, UK, 3-5 September 2012, pp. 563 - 574.Publisher
© ARCOM / the authorsVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publication date
2012Notes
This is a conference paper. It is also available at: http://www.arcom.ac.uk/ISBN
9780955239069Language
- en