The Two Facets of Differential Leadership: The Moderating Effect of Group Collectiveness

• Main Authors: Tien-Yin Wu, 伍恬瑩
• Other Authors: 鄭伯壎
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2013
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/22181933414899529372

碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 心理學研究所 === 102 === Differential leadership is a vivid leadership style in Chinese organizations. The leaders tend to divide subordinates into two distinct groups: “in-group” and “out-group”. Between the two groups, leaders express different leadership styles and allocate unequal resources toward them. Therefore, when discussing about the effectiveness of differential leadership, the research level should not be limited to individual or dyad level. Instead, the group level effect of differential leadership should be taken into consideration. This study aims to address this unsolved issue of how differential leadership affects group behaviors and effectiveness. According to the perspective of social identity theory, the tendency of leaders treating group members differently is a threat to group members’ identities. In order to stay in “in-group” status or change the current “out-group” status, group members will react by taking passive or active reactions, causing decrease in group organizational citizenship behaviors and increase in group political behaviors. In addition, group collectiveness is one of the situational norms which emphasizes group interests more than individual interests and might influences the interactions among group members. For this reason, group collectiveness might be an important moderating factor in this study. To solve the issues mentioned, this study conducted a survey research on 97 groups, which included 550 individual group members from Chinese organizations in Taiwan. This study finds that after excluding the effect of LMX differentiation: 1) Differential leadership still has significant effect toward group effectiveness, 2) Differential leadership is positively associated with group organizational citizenship behavior, which is opposite to the original hypothesis, 3) Differential leadership is positively associated with group political behavior, 4) The interaction of differential leadership and group collectiveness is positively associated with group organizational citizenship behavior and negatively associated with group political behavior. Contributions, limits, future directions and implications are discussed at the end.