Does team psychological capital predict team outcomes at work?

This study is situated in the paradigms of positive organizational scholarship (POS) and positive organizational behaviour (POB). It draws upon the theoretical mechanisms of social learning and emotional contagion to suggest that psychological capital may spread through work teams to impact team outcomes such as performance, innovation, and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). The degree to which team psychological capital (TPsyCap) mediated the relationship between leader psychological capital (LPsyCap) and team outcomes was also tested (n = 94 teams; n = 94 leaders; n = 550 employees). Using structural equation modelling, LPsyCap and TPsyCap were both related to team-level organizational citizenship behavior, team performance, and team innovation. However, the relationship between LPsyCap and TPsyCap was not significant. These findings support the positioning of psychological capital as an important resource for optimal team functioning but also suggest that workplaces cannot expect that leaders, through their own psychological capital alone, can create team-level psychological capital. Instead, the current research suggests that other organizational initiatives and experiences are needed to enhance LPsyCap. The results contribute to a better understanding of POS and POB in general and, specifically, to the recently emerging construct of team psychological capital

Participative Decision Making in Schools: A Mediating-Moderating Analytical Framework for Understanding School and Teacher Outcomes

The increasing emergence of participation in decision making (PDM) in schools reflects the widely shared belief that flatter management and decentralized authority structures carry the potential for promoting school effectiveness. However, the literature indicates a discrepancy between the intuitive appeal of PDM and empirical evidence in respect of its sweeping advantages. The purpose of this theoretical article is to develop a comprehensive model for understanding the distinct impacts of PDM on school and teachers’ outcomes. The proposed analytical framework is set within contingency theory and is aimed to predict the distinct impacts of PDM on school outcomes: innovation, organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), and productivity; and on teacher outcomes: job satisfaction and strain. It contains mediator-moderator components, where the mediator factors explain the relationship between PDM and school and teacher outcomes and the moderator factors influence the strength and/or the direction of these relationships. Specifically, the framework suggests that two mechanisms, one motivational and one cognitive, serve as mediators in the PDM-outcomes relationship. Then, by taking a multilevel perspective, the author posits moderators that may facilitate or inhibit the PDM effect: teacher personality (the Big Five personality characteristics) at the individual level, principal-teacher exchange (leader-member exchange; LMX) at the dyadic level, structure (bureaucratic/ organic) at the school level, and culture (individualism/collectivism) at the environmental level. </jats:p

A New Perspective for Understanding School Managers’ Roles: The Impact of Principals’ Boundary Activities on the Effectiveness of School Management Teams

Background/ContextIncreasingly, educational leadership research has stressed that leadership is not solely embedded in formal roles but often emerges from relationships between individuals. Senior management teams (SMTs) are an important expression of a formal management structure based on the principle of distributed leadership. Such structures may require a reconceptualization of school leadership and the role of the principal in such a way as to better meet new challenges and enable principals to manage SMTs more effectively. Accordingly, it is proposed that to improve effectiveness, principals engage in boundary activities, the principals’ internal activities directed toward the SMT aimed at dealing with internal team matters and the principals’ external activities directed toward external agents in the team's focal environment to acquire resources and protect the team.Purpose/ObjectiveThe present study attempts to advance a theoretical model of principals’ internal and external activities toward their SMTs. This study's purpose is twofold: First, the study tries to determine which of the internal and external activities principals engage in more frequently and less frequently and to what extent. Second, the study attempts to determine how these activities are related to the SMT effectiveness outcomes: in-role performance and innovation. Taking on a distributive perspective to school leadership, our goal is to extend our knowledge about the activities that might facilitate SMT effectiveness, by highlighting the principal boundary activities as fundamental.Research DesignQuantitative study.Data Collection and AnalysisData were collected from two sources to minimize problems associated with same source bias: 92 SMTs and their principals from 92 public schools in Israel. Principals evaluated the SMTs’ effectiveness through validated surveys of team in-role performance and team innovation, and SMT members evaluated the internal and external activities of the principal.Findings/ResultsANOVA analyses indicate significant mean differences between the principal's internal and external activities. Results from Structural Equation Model indicate that internal activities were related to SMT performance, whereas external activities were related to SMT innovation.Conclusions/RecommendationsPrincipals who manage both the internal SMT dynamic by promoting SMT identity and building team trust, while also promoting a common mission, serve the role of coordinator between SMT members and constituencies external to the SMT, enhancing SMT effectiveness. It may be, then, that studying new models of school leadership and management, including the relationship of the principal and the SMT, may deepen our understanding of the increasingly complex role of principals today.</jats:sec

Team Citizenship Pressure: How Does It Relate to OCB and Citizenship Fatigue

The aim of this research is to shed light on the phenomenon of citizenship pressure as a team-level construct. Building on the conservation of resources theory, the study used a moderated-mediation model to explore whether team organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) mediates the relationship between team citizenship pressure and team citizenship fatigue and whether this mediation is moderated by perceived supervisor support. Results from a study of 91 professional teams in the educational system indicate that team citizenship pressure had a significant and positive relationship with team OCB, as well as with team citizenship fatigue. The results also support the overall moderated-mediation model, but contrary to the hypothesized pattern of interaction, we found that team citizenship pressure was significantly and positively correlated with OCB when perceived supervisor support was low, but not when it was high. Limitations and implications for future research are discussed. </jats:p