ScholarOne - Examining the Impact of Shared Leadership and Team
Psychological Capital on Empowerment in Virtual Teams
Abstract
With the worldwide COVID-19 outbreak, the gig economy, the
lightning-fast technological advancements, workforce diversity, the
emergence of freelance virtual contributors, and the blurring of
work-life boundaries, a new collective leadership model called “Shared
Leadership” became imperative. In this context, the virtual teams may
experience conflicts that must be resolved constructively so that the
team members can assume their duties and demonstrate excellent positive
team behaviour, including team performance. The Team must be in an
“empowered mental state” to achieve this. The existing literature
acknowledges that Shared Leadership (SL) is an antecedent for Team
Empowerment (TE). However, these studies hardly examine the mental
process through which SL leads to TE. The literature explains the role
of psychological capital as the mediating factor between SL and
employees’ positive job outcomes like team citizenship behaviour and
team performance, which are physical and behavioural outcomes. This
article fills an essential gap in the literature by examining the
involvement of Team Psychological Capital (TPC) in helping SL to develop
TE. Here, data was collected from 402 virtual team members belonging to
48 teams from various Indian industries. By conducting partial least
squares structural equation modelling and looking at the Team as the
unit of analysis, the Study showed that Team psychological capital
partially mediates the relationship between SL and TE. Based on the
results, the authors recommend that managers focus on decentralized
Leadership and take steps to develop TPC for creating a high-empowered
team.