Advances in Global Leadership

Team Leaders Emotional Intelligence, Personality, and Empowering Behavior: An

Investigation of their Relations to Team Climate
Dong Liu, Chi-Sum Wong, Ping-Ping Fu

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To cite this document: Dong Liu, Chi-Sum Wong, Ping-Ping Fu. "Team Leaders
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Relations to Team Climate" In Advances in Global Leadership. Published online: 10
Mar 2015; 77-104.
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TEAM LEADERS EMOTIONAL

INTELLIGENCE, PERSONALITY,
AND EMPOWERING BEHAVIOR:
AN INVESTIGATION OF THEIR
RELATIONS TO TEAM CLIMATE
Dong Liu, Chi-Sum Wong and Ping-Ping Fu
ABSTRACT
Leaders emotional intelligence (EI), personality, and empowering
behavior have been heavily studied in the organizational behavior
literature. To date, the majority of research on EI and personality has
shown their signicant inuence on personal outcomes. It has also been
suggested that empowerment is a fundamental psychological mechanism
underlying follower outcomes. Nevertheless, little attention has been paid
to the effect of team leaders EI and personality on team outcomes and the
potential mediating effect of team leaders empowering behavior. In this
study, we developed theoretical rationale and empirically tested the effect
of team leaders EI and personality on team climate and the mediating
role that team leaders empowering behavior plays in this relationship.
The results supported most of our hypothesized relationships, that is, the
positive effects of team leaders EI and agreeableness on team climate
were mediated by team leaders empowering behavior, whereas team

Advances in Global Leadership, Volume 7, 77104

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All rights of reproduction in any form reserved
ISSN: 1535-1203/doi:10.1108/S1535-1203(2012)0000007008

77

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DONG LIU ET AL.

leaders openness to new experience was not related to empowering

behavior and team climate. Finally, theoretical and practical implications
were discussed.

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INTRODUCTION
A plethora of research has been conducted on empowering leadership, and
its positive effect on employees outcomes has been well established
(Spreitzer, De Janasz, & Quinn, 1999). The consensus is that empowered
employees become more satised with their jobs and committed to their
afliated organizations, and empowering leadership stimulates profound
changes within organizations (e.g., Conger & Kanungo, 1988; Liu, Zhang,
Wang & Lee, 2011; Thomas & Velthouse, 1990). As the business world
becomes increasingly competitive, more and more rms are using teams to
improve operation efciency and response speed (French & Bell, 1999).
Teams have even been suggested as the primary means through which work
is done in organizations (Arnold, Arad, Rhoades, & Drasgow, 2000; Liu,
Liu, Kwan, & Mao, 2009). Team leaders are expected to support team
members and enhance team performance as a whole. However, existing
empowerment research has focused mostly on empowered individuals
personal outcomes and has not provided organizations with useful guidance
as to what type of leader behaviors may empower team members and what
outcomes can be expected at the team level. That is, the specic role leaders
play throughout team empowerment process, their emotional intelligence
(EI) and personality in particular, and their inuence on overall team
outcomes have not been sufciently examined.
Although both EI and personality are predispositions of a leader, EI is
treated more as abilities and is found to be trainable (Goleman, 1995; Nelis,
Quoidbach, Mikolajczak, & Hansenne, 2009; Wong, Foo, Wang, & Wong,
2007), whereas personality refers to the traits of a person, which are hard to
be changed and trained (Costa & McCrae, 1992). EI is about how people
recognize and manage emotions (Jordan, Ashkanasy, & Hartel, 2002). It
has been recognized as an important factor for leadership effectiveness
(Goleman, 1998), inuencing the social interaction and interrelationship in
the team beyond the impact of traditional personality traits. Law, Wong,
and Songs (2004) study provided sufcient evidence regarding how EI is
related to but distinct from personality traits measured in the Big Five
dimensions. They found that after controlling for the effect of the Big Five

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Team Leaders Emotional Intelligence, Personality, and Empowering Behavior

79

personality dimensions, EI still accounted for more than 10% of the

variance in in-role and extra-role performance when peer ratings of EI were
used. Therefore, using personality alone will not capture all the effects of
leaders predispositions on their behavior. Nevertheless, surprisingly little
research has simultaneously examined the effects of both EI and personality
of the leader on his/her empowering behavior as well as team outcomes.
In this study, we furthered understanding of empowerment by examining
both team leaders ability (emotional intelligence) and personality traits
(agreeableness and openness to new experience) as predictors for their
empowering behaviors. We also developed theoretical arguments for and
tested the mediating roles of team leaders empowering behavior on the
relationships between these predictors and team climate which, an
extensively recognized team-level factor affecting team outcomes, has been
demonstrated to cause such important team outcomes as innovation
and effectiveness (e.g., Anderson & West, 1998; Mathisen, Torsheim, &
Einarsen, 2006). Thus, we contribute primarily to the empowerment
literature by (1) investigating both leaders ability and traits that is, EI
(ability), agreeableness, and openness to new experience (traits) as
antecedents to leaders empowering behavior, and (2) demonstrating leaders
empowering behavior as the underlying psychological mechanism that
translates team leaders EI, agreeableness, and openness to new experience
to team climate.

LITERATURE REVIEW AND HYPOTHESES

Teams are commonly dened as the structured sets of people that pursue
collective performance objectives within larger organizational systems and
that require coordinated interactions to successfully accomplish relevant
tasks (Cohen & Bailey, 1997; Liao, Liu, & Loi, 2010). Researchers have
found that teams are able to integrate personal input and, therefore,
generally overrun individuals acting alone, especially when performance
requires diverse skills, coordinated schedule, informed judgment, and
multiple accountabilities to satisfy rapidly changing customer demands
(French & Bell, 1999). Along with the research on teams, the past two
decades have witnessed a burgeoning volume of research on team climate.
Team climate is normally conceptualized as individuals constructive
representations or cognitive schema of their work environments and has
been operationalized principally through attempts to highlight individuals
sense-making of their proximal work environment (e.g., Ashforth, 1985;

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James & Sells, 1981; Schneider & Reichers, 1983). For example, James and
Sells (1981) dened climate as individuals cognitive representations of
proximal environments expressed in terms of psychological meaning and
signicance to the individual. Team climate was more specically
dimensionalized by Schneider (1990), who conceptualized team climate into
four specic dimensions organizational citizenship behavior (OCB),
cohesiveness, norm, and potency to represent individuals perception of
their team environment. All of these four dimensions reect team members
positive cognitions and feelings toward the team from different perspectives.
A cooperative or positive climate has been found to be positively associated
with team performance (Keller, Julian, & Kedia, 1996), team satisfaction
(Gil, Rico, Alcover, & Barrasa, 2005), and team innovation (Mathisen et al.,
2006). Although much has been learned about the outcomes of team
climate, studies on its antecedents and especially the link between leadership
and team climate are still inadequate.

Team Leaders EI and Team Climate

Leadership and climate have been identied as implicitly interlinked
(Gil et al., 2005), although the corresponding theoretical arguments and
empirical tests need to be further strengthened. As early as 1939, Lewin,
Lippitt, and White had found that different leadership styles of authoritarian, democratic, and laissez faire inuenced respondents perceptions of
climate and behavioral consequences. Later, Litwin and Stringer (1968)
noted that the general organizational climate was signicantly differently
affected by the leaders with such disparate styles as bureaucratic, cooperative, and productivity oriented; climates may even become increasingly
differentiated over time because of the difference in leadership style.
Drawing on the interactionist-based climate theory (Schneider, 1983) and
vertical dyad linkage theory of leadership (Graen, 1976; Graen & Cashman,
1975), Kozlowski and Doherty (1989) argued that subordinates with highquality relationships with supervisors had more positive climate perceptions
and showed greater consensus on perceptions of climate, which were
meanwhile more similar to those of their supervisors than did subordinates
with low-quality relationships with their supervisors.
To date, EI represents a growing area of behavioral research and has been
demonstrated as an active catalyst for leadership style in the workplace
(Zeidner, Matthews, & Roberts, 2004). Salovey and Mayer (1990, p. 189)
dened EI as the subset of social intelligence that involves the ability to

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Team Leaders Emotional Intelligence, Personality, and Empowering Behavior

81

monitor ones own and others feelings and emotions, to discriminate

among them and to use this information to guide ones thinking and
actions. Davies, Stankov and Roberts (1998) conceptualized EI into four
dimensions, namely, appraisal and expression of emotion in oneself,
appraisal and recognition of emotion in others, regulation of emotion in
oneself, and use of emotion to facilitate performance.
EI may facilitate both team social exchange process and leadership style.
Emotionally intelligent employees in the organization are generally more
empathetic and able to communicate effectively with others, which can, in
turn, allow them to develop cohesive and supportive relation networks
(Abraham, 1999; Thoits, 1989). In addition, high EI individuals are particularly excellent in cooperating with others while engaging in teamwork
(Mayer & Salovey, 1997). Accordingly, leaders with high EI seem to develop
better communication and cooperation with the subordinates in teams,
which can in turn foster good relationships between leaders and
subordinates. As the leadersubordinate dyadic relationship model for
team climate suggests (Kozlowski & Doherty, 1989), the good relationships
within teams appear to foster positive team climate.
More recently, EI has been highlighted as a critical component of
leadership style, especially for leaders working in team settings (Goleman,
Boyatzis, & McKee, 2002). Prati, Douglas, Ferris, Ammeter, and Buckley
(2003) further argued that emotionally intelligent leaders may contribute to
teams in two ways: motivation and transformation. First, they are able to
motivate their followers to form positive attitudes about circumstances and
engage in pro-team behaviors. In this manner, positive emotions of team
leaders were found to enhance team members emotional states and provide
an impetus for teams to perform with more enthusiasm and engagement
(Sosik & Megerian, 1999). Second, emotionally intelligent leaders are able to
exert transformational effects over teams. As argued by Sosik and Megerian
(1999), the four characteristics of transformational leaders (charismatic,
intellectual stimulation, individualized concern, and inspirational motivation) assume much similarity with the behaviors of individuals considered to
have high levels of EI. The transformational behavior and motivational
inuence from high EI team leaders may be favorable to maintaining
positive team climate. Emotionally intelligent team leaders are more inclined
to stimulate intellectual interaction within their teams, show personal
concern to team members, and inspire the whole teams to strive for team
goals. Further, George (2000) used the MayerSaloveyCaruso four branch
model of EI (Mayer, Salovey, & Caruso, 2002) as a heuristic framework for
analyzing the importance of EI in effective leadership. According to this

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model, emotionally intelligent leaders are able to facilitate such aspects of

positive climate as excitement, enthusiasm, and optimism in the work
environment and to maintain a climate of cooperation and cohesiveness
through the development of high-quality interpersonal relationships. Wong
and Law (2002) found that middle managers EI is positively related to their
subordinates OCBs. Therefore,
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Hypothesis 1. Team leaders EI facilitates positive team climate.

Team Leaders Agreeableness and Team Climate

Personality has been recognized as playing an important role in leadership
effectiveness. In personality studies, increased evidence is given to support
the Big Five approach to personality. The Big Five model is able to provide
a unied, comprehensive theoretical framework for scrutinizing the association between leaders personality and leadership style (De Hoogh, Den
Hartog, & Koopman, 2005). Based on 14 samples of leaders from over 200
organizations, the traits from the ve-factor model of personality have been
linked to transformational leadership behavior (Judge & Bono, 2000).
Judge, Bono, Ilies and Gerhardt (2002) have conrmed the existence of
signicant and generalizable relationships between each of the ve
personality factors and leadership effectiveness and found that 16% of the
variance of leadership effectiveness can be explained by personality. In the
team context, Barrick, Stewart, Neubert, and Mount (1998), using data
from 51 work teams, showed a signicant relationship between team
members general ability and Big Five personality factors with team viability
and team performance. The above evidence suggests that leadership
effectiveness in teams can, to some extent, be predicted from personality.
Therefore, the relationship between leaders personality and team outcomes
is worthy of more attention from organizational behavior researchers.
Agreeableness, one of the Big Five factors, refers to such aspects as
selessness, cooperativeness, helpfulness, tolerance, exibility, generosity,
sympathy, and courtesy and taps in to the motives for being altruistic and
maintaining positive relations with others (Digman, 1990). We selected this
factor not only because it is the most relevant to outcome variables in the
situations where collective performance and coordination are needed
(Barrick et al., 1998), but also due to its unparalleled predictive power
among the Big Five personality traits for transformational leadership
(Judge & Bono, 2000). The measure of team climate used in the present

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Team Leaders Emotional Intelligence, Personality, and Empowering Behavior

83

study contains such facets as team OCB, team cohesiveness, team norm, and
team potency. The primary motivational orientation of agreeable leaders is
altruism (Wiggins, 1996), which is also a paramount aspect of OCB; thus,
agreeable leaders may personally display a positive model of OCB and, at
the same time, encourage teammates to engage more in OCB as well. Being
concerned with others interests and showing empathy for their conditions
are also the important characteristics of agreeableness, which can be
expected to strengthen team cohesiveness and team potency. In fact, Hogan
and Shelton (1998) have found that agreeable supervisors were prone to
creating friendly relations among subordinates and perking up their
potential.
Moreover, agreeable persons tend to cope with conict cooperatively and
collaboratively, strive for common understanding, and think highly of social
afliations (Digman, 1990). Team leaders, who are high on the relationship
orientation, may thus win respect and trust from other team members. In
the long run, there will be good connections, cohesiveness, and potency
existing among team leaders and followers. Notably, high-quality leader
member exchanges have been identied as a valuable predictor of positive
team climate (Kozlowski & Doherty, 1989). Therefore, we hypothesize:
Hypothesis 2. Team leaders agreeableness facilitates positive team
climate.

Team Leaders Openness to New Experience and Team Climate

Openness to new experience, also one of the Big Five dimensions, represents
the tendencies to be imaginative, curious, original, and broadminded
(Costa & McCrae, 1992). This trait has also been reported to serve as a
strong predictor of leadership effectiveness (Judge et al., 2002) and a
signicant correlate of transformational leadership (Judge & Bono, 2000).
While there is no theory and evidence on whether openness to new
experience is related to overall team consequences, it is still reasonable to
anticipate a positive link between openness to new experience and team
climate. The conception of leadership is indeed inherent in teams (Yukl &
Van Fleet, 1992) because leadership cannot exist without the presence of
both leaders and subordinates. As a result, there is a good reason to expect
that openness to new experience as a strong predictor for leadership style
may exert inuence on team climate as well. Leaders, who are open to new
experiences, often have a desire to see and experience new things, thereby

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DONG LIU ET AL.

giving birth to creative change in teams (Manning, 2003). Creative team

changes require all members cooperation and coordination, which can help
form favorable team climate. LePine, Colquitt, and Erez (2000) found that
openness to new experience of team members is signicantly associated with
efcient team decision-making processes. Perhaps this is because open
individuals appear to engage in the type of self regulation that is necessary
for learning and resolving to change in novel situations (Blickle, 1996;
Busato, Prins, Elshout, & Hamaker, 1999). LePine et al. (2000) noted that
openness to new experience would be benecial to the adaptability to the
changing collective task contexts because of its self-regulating effect.
Furthermore, open people are more likely to be reective and thoughtful
when they encounter new ideas (LePine, Hollenbeck, Ilgen, & Hedlund,
1997). Open leaders would be expected to provide more intellectual
stimulation to followers, as openness to new experience is associated with
intellectuality or intellectance (McCrae & Costa, 1997). These tendencies are
all of value in enhancing team cohesiveness and potency in that the more
team leaders appear to be open, the more tolerance they will have for new
and unusual propositions among the team members, which will in turn
support the harmonious team atmosphere and stimulate teammates
wisdom. On the contrary, less open team leaders may be more conventional,
conservative, and uncomfortable with differences, and restrict unexpected
input and may be thereby less capable of generating a positive team climate.
Therefore, we hypothesize:
Hypothesis 3. Team leaders openness to new experience facilitates
positive team climate.
Empowering leadership has been widely explored in the organizational
literature (e.g., Arnold et al., 2000; Chebat & Kollias, 2000; Conger, 1989).
Practitioners and researchers alike have identied empowerment as a
construct warranting further investigation (Kanter, 1989; Spreitzer, 1995).
Two related conceptions of empowering leadership exist in the literature.
One approach focuses on the delegation of hierarchical power in the
organization and denes empowerment as a practice, or set of practices
involving the delegation of responsibility down the hierarchy so as to give
employees increased decision-making authority in respect of the execution
of their primary work tasks (Leach, Wall, & Jackson, 2003, p. 28). The
other approach that is frequently used in team empowerment research
delineates a set of empowering behaviors applicable in the work setting of
teams. More specically, this approach considers empowering leadership as
a ve-category behavior based on employees perceptions, including

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Team Leaders Emotional Intelligence, Personality, and Empowering Behavior

85

(a) coaching, (b) informing, (c) leading by example, (d) showing concern,
and (e) participative decision-making (Arnold et al., 2000). The latter
approach has been cross-validated in different organizations and found to
provide rich information regarding team leaders specic role in the
empowering process (Arnold et al., 2000). Therefore, we adopt the second
approach to study team empowerment process in this chapter and examine
whether team leaders EI (ability), agreeableness (trait), and openness to
new experience (trait) are able to affect team climate through team leaders
empowering behavior.

Team Leaders EI and Empowering Behavior

As stated above, the link between leaders EI and effective team leadership has
already garnered extensive attention from researchers. EI mirrors the ability
to sense and understand ones own and others emotions in social contexts
and to utilize related information to inuence others through emotional
regulation and control. As such, it works as a critically important impetus for
effective leadership in the organization. In this sense, Goleman et al. (2002)
argued that EI is salient in effective team leadership as emotionally intelligent
leaders are good at managing their own emotions and then building sound
relationships with team members over the process. To be specic, at the stage
of making team goals, emotionally intelligent leaders seem to be more skillful
in negotiating with teammates about the reasonable standards for team
performance, treating their subordinates suggestions with respect, and
making the team goals acceptable to all team members. Then, while implementing team goals, teams will benet more from having high EI leaders
because such leaders give individual team members more meaning and choice
on completing specic team tasks and making them feel condent and
competent in the process of dealing with these tasks together with other team
members. Such leadership behaviors at different stages of team activities
indeed reect characteristics of empowerment.
Moreover, Spreitzer (1995) emphasized that competence, meaningfulness,
choice, and impact are necessary conditions for empowerment. The four key
aspects of EI appraisal and expression of emotions in oneself, appraisal
and recognition of emotions in others, regulation of emotions in oneself,
and use of emotions to facilitate performance are deemed important to
establish the strong relationships between leaders and subordinates (George,
2000; Sosik & Megerian, 1999). The strong leadersubordinate relationships
can help team leaders convey competence, meaningfulness, choice, and

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DONG LIU ET AL.

impact to their followers. Over the teamwork process, emotionally

intelligent leaders are especially prominent in addressing competence and
meaningfulness, interacting with each of his/her team members, and
encouraging continued individual development given that they are excellent
in managing their own and others emotion (Bass, 1985, 1997; Kouzes &
Posner, 1987). In other words, EI enables leaders to empower team members
for their satisfaction, development, and high team performance. Overall, the
literature on EI has proposed that individuals described as possessing a high
level of EI own the characteristics that can trigger empowering behaviors.
Therefore,
Hypothesis 4. Team leaders EI is positively associated with team leaders
empowering behavior.

Team Leaders Agreeableness and Empowering Behavior

Big Five personality traits have been theoretically established and empirically
conrmed as important predictors of leaders behavior (e.g., Judge & Bono,
2000; Judge et al., 2002). Agreeable individuals are generally altruistic, warm,
generous, trusting, and cooperative (Costa & McCrae, 1992). Agreeableness
is negatively related to aggression and hostility behaviors (Costa & McCrae,
1992; Zuckerman, Kuhlman, Joireman, & Teta, 1993), which hinder the
effective communication and perception of leaders empowering behavior.
Since agreeable leaders are usually warmhearted and cooperative, they should
be more likely to develop positive mutual relationships with their followers. A
meta-analysis indicates that agreeable persons are more likely to become
popular among coworkers (Barrick & Judge, 2001). Graziano, JensenCampbell, and Hair (1996) found that agreeable individuals preferred
interpersonal interactions that were oriented toward conict avoidance and
team cooperation. Notably, positive interpersonal relationships and interactions in teams appear to reinforce leaders authority and subordinates
recognition of leaders exemplary activities, which are an indispensable part
of empowering behavior.
Moreover, agreeable people are concerned with others interests. This
may be a prerequisite to be able to understand subordinates perspective
and infuse their work with meaning a critical feature of empowering
behavior. Being concerned about others may also help get team members
informed of team information and involved in team decision-making
processes, which is indicative of leaders empowering behavior. So, highly

Team Leaders Emotional Intelligence, Personality, and Empowering Behavior

87

agreeable leaders should be more likely to guide followers (coaching), have

their teams informed of work-related news (informing), be concerned
about team well-being (concerning), and invite team members to be
involved in the decision-making process (participative decision-making).
Therefore, we hypothesize:

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Hypothesis 5. Team leaders agreeableness is positively associated with

team leaders empowering behavior.

Team Leaders Openness to New Experience and Empowering Behavior

Of the Big Five personality traits, openness to new experience is not
only the best predictor of artistic and scientic creativity (Feist, 1998), but
also a signicant correlate of leadership (Bass, 1990). Individuals scoring high on openness to new experience are characterized by traits like
creativity, imagination, unconventionality, autonomy, and divergent thinking (McCrae & Costa, 1987). First, creativity, a hallmark of openness,
appears to be a valuable skill of effective leaders in Yukls (1998) summary
of the skills of leaders in that effective team leaders should not only be able
to adhere to team goals but also endeavor to be creative in absorbing and
implementing the diverse opinions from team members. Open team leaders
are more likely to emerge as empowerment activators, because they are
more open and geared to the differences existing in the team (Goldberg,
1990; McCrae & Costa, 1987). In other words, team leaders can hardly
empower subordinates unless they are willing to tolerate the diverse
opinions and behaviors in the team. Further, close-minded individuals were
found to conform tightly to established organizational rules and reject
exibility in the decision-making process (Costa & McCrae, 1992). In this
sense, leaders who are not open to new experience may show little tolerance
of subordinates involvement in making important team decisions whereas
participative decision-making is in fact a salient indication of empowering
behavior.
Second, since open leaders have a strong desire for changes, they may
naturally want their followers to understand and adapt to the transformation (Costa & McCrae, 1992). Two possible means by which leaders make
team members attuned to changes are coaching and informing, namely
two of the ve core components of Arnold and colleagues (2000)
conceptualization of leaders empowering behavior. Coaching refers to a
set of leaders behaviors that educate team members and help them to

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become self-reliant, and informing involves disseminating company wide

information such as mission and philosophy as well as other important
information regarding team or individual development (Arnold et al.,
2000). Leaders who score high on openness to new experience would be
expected to render more coaching and informing, as they want to spread
the information on change to get support from their subordinates.
Therefore, we hypothesize:
Hypothesis 6. Team leaders openness to new experience is positively
associated with team leaders empowering behavior.

The Mediating Role of Team Leaders Empowering Behavior

Importantly, researchers have highlighted the pivotal role of leadermember
interaction in linking leadership to team climate. When leaders display
empowering behavior before followers, there will be mutual interaction
happening among them according to the role-making process model
(Graen & Scandura, 1987), which suggested an interactive process whereby
leadership may take effect in the work setting. Kozlowski and Doherty
(1989) empirically conrmed that the interaction between leaders of varied
leadership styles and subordinates (operationalized as negotiating latitude)
was able to affect the perceptions of positive cooperative climate in the
workplace. The interactive role-making process consists of three specic
critical stages: (a) role taking, (b) role making, and (c) role routinization
(Graen & Scandura, 1987). At the role taking stage, leaders try to get
acquainted with subordinates abilities and characteristics by frequent
mutual communication. The nature of the relationship between leaders and
subordinates will be nally ascertained either implicitly or explicitly during
role-playing. At this stage, leaders take action in sharing information with
subordinates, increasing their inuence in decision-making process, providing them with authority and autonomy, and exhibiting concern and trust to
them (Graen & Scandura, 1987). These aspects of leaders behavior are
consistent with the ve dimensions of leaders empowering behavior: (a)
coaching, (b) informing, (c) leading by example, (d) showing concern, and
(e) participative decision-making. Finally, the nature of the dyadic leader
subordinate relations will be further reinforced through role routinization,
which reinforces the aspects of leaders role-making behavior in the
subsequent interaction between the parties. Accordingly, we further argue
that the effects of team leaders EI, agreeableness, and open to new

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experience on team climate may be transmitted through leaders empowering behavior, which is embedded in the interactive process in teams.
Empowerment theory and research also suggest that leaders empowering
behavior contributes to team empowerment to the degree to which it affects
team members perception of team goal, competence, cohesiveness, or norm
(Spreitzer, 1996). The categories of team climate correspond quite well to
the team empowerment outcomes mentioned above. Team climate can be
enhanced when teams are empowered to accomplish their goals in the way
they see t. Problems may occur if team leaders override teammates feelings
and impose personal priority over the others. Wheelan (1999) found that
teams are less likely to be cohesive if leaders reject or intervene excessively in
team members personal activities. A sense of empowerment is particularly
important in teams because the work output is achieved by collective effort.
Team leaders engaging in more empowering behavior tend to exert more
positive effects on team climate. Since internal disagreement inevitably
results in disputes among team members, teams receiving more empowerment are more resilient and more likely to maintain harmony and form
positive team climate. Given team leaders role in the team process (Kovach,
2002) and the empowerment effect on team outcomes (Barnard, 1999), it is
logical to infer that leaders empowering behavior would be particularly
helpful for successful formation of favorable team climate. Moreover,
inuenced by their own ability (EI) and traits (personality), team leaders
empowering behavior should work as a bridge linking the leaders ability
and personality to the actual team outcomes. Therefore, we argue that team
leaders EI, agreeableness, and openness to new experience affect team

Team Leaders Emotional

Intelligence
- Self-emotion appraisal
- Regulation of emotion
- Use of emotion
- Other-emotion appraisal

Team Leaders Personality

- Agreeableness
- Openness to new
experience

Fig. 1.

Team Leaders Empowering

Behavior
- Leading by example
- Coaching
- Concerning
- Informing
- Participative decisionmaking

Proposed Theoretical Model.

Team Climate
-Team OCB
-Team cohesiveness
-Team norm
-Team potency

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DONG LIU ET AL.

climate via their own empowering behavior (see Fig. 1 for the hypothesized
relationships in this research). Specically,

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Hypothesis 7a. Team leaders empowering behavior mediates the positive

relationship between team leaders EI and positive team climate.
Hypothesis 7b. Team leaders empowering behavior mediates the positive
relationship between team leaders agreeableness and positive team
climate.
Hypothesis 7c. Team leaders empowering behavior mediates the positive
relationship between team leaders openness to new experience and
positive team climate.

METHODS
Sample and Procedure
The sample of the study included the leaders and subordinates of teams
working in a major insurance company in Hong Kong. The teams in this
sample sold a variety of insurance products and were paid primarily on a
commission basis. To ensure the condentiality and anonymity of our
survey, we provided respondents with cover letters explaining the research
purpose as well as self-addressed and stamped envelopes to allow them to
send back their responses directly to us. The survey consisted of two waves.
We rst collected the data from 105 team leaders who took part in the
company training sessions. Next, two team members of each team were
asked to provide additional data by survey questionnaires distributed
through the company mail system. Ninety-three teams responded to our
survey, reaching a response rate of 89%. In total, we had 279 respondents of
93 teams participating in this survey (i.e., one team leader and two team
members on each team).
The responding team leaders had a mean age of 43.70 years (SD 5.45),
and 49% were female. Mean tenure with the organization was 12.15 years
(SD 5.03). 89.1% of the respondents had technical school, high school, or
university education. To reduce common method bias, we used multiple
sources to collect data on our variables. Team leaders reported their age,
tenure, education level, and personality variables, namely agreeableness and
openness to new experience, and evaluated the team climate. One team

Team Leaders Emotional Intelligence, Personality, and Empowering Behavior

91

member evaluated the team leaders EI, and the other member assessed the
team leaders empowering behavior.

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Measures
Emotional Intelligence
We used the 16-item scale developed by Wong and Law (2002) and crossvalidated by Law et al. (2004) through a rigorous process to measure team
leaders EI. A sample item reads: My team leader is a good observer of
others emotions. One team member in every team indicated the extent to
which the items could characterize his or her team leaders EI (1 to a very
low extent to 5 to a very high extent). The internal consistency
reliability (coefcient alpha) of this scale was .84.
Agreeableness and Openness to New Experience
With regard to the two facets of Big Five personality trait, we used the six
pairs of adjectives that represent opposite meanings to measure agreeableness and openness to new experience (McCrae & Costa, 1987), three for each
of the two variables respectively. Team leaders were instructed to rate the
list of adjectives according to how they were at the present time, not how
they wished to be in the future, using 7-point Likert-type rating format that
ranged from 1 (conforming to one adjective) to 7 (conforming to the other
opposite adjective). Two representing opposite adjectives for openness to
new experience are narrow-minded and open-minded. Uncooperative and cooperative are two representing opposite adjectives for
agreeableness. The Cronbach alphas were .86 for agreeableness and .91
for openness to new experiences.
Leaders Empowering Behavior
Leaders empowering behavior was based upon the empowering leadership
questionnaire developed by Arnold et al. (2000), which consists of 19 items
of 5 dimensions leading by example, coaching, concerning, informing, and
participative decision-making. This scale was derived from the research in
the team context. One team member of each team was asked to evaluate the
extent to which he or she agreed with the statements of leaders empowering
behavior in teams. We used a 5-point Likert-type scale (1 strongly disagree
to 5 strongly agree) as the rating format. An example item is: He or she

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helps me see areas in which I need more training. The internal consistency
reliability of this 19-item scale was .94.
Team Climate
We assessed team climate using an instrument developed by Schneider
(1990). The measure consists of eight items designed to reect four
dimensions: team OCB, team cohesiveness, team norm, and team potency.
Each team leader of the sampled 93 teams was asked to assess the degree to
which the items could be typical of the characteristics of their teams (1 to
a very low extent to 5 to a very high extent). An example item is: My
team members show concern for the well-being and development of the
team. The internal consistency reliability was .91.
Control Variables
Self-reported team leaders demographics variables such as age, gender,
educational level, and tenure with the organization were statistically
controlled because team leaders empowering behavior may change with
their career span, gender difference, and knowledge reservoir (Arnold et al.,
2000).

Analyses
Although all the measures used are well established, we still conducted a
series of Conrmatory Factor Analyses (CFA) to examine the goodness of
t and discriminant validity of our ve-factor (i.e., the two personality
dimensions, EI, empowering behavior, and team climate) model. Due to the
small sample size (n 93), we got a marginally acceptable model:
RMSEA .07, CFI .89, NNFI .88, IFI .89. Further, the chi-squares
and other t statistics also showed that the current model tted the data
better than other alternatives such as a single-factor model in which all
constructs were combined into one factor (RMSEA .13, CFI .75,
NNFI .71, IFI .73), a four-factor model in which the two personality
dimensions were constrained as one factor (RMSEA .09, CFI .83,
NNFI .81, IFI .82). These CFA results provided sufcient evidence for
the discriminant validity of the current ve-factor model.
We ran a series of regressions to conrm the mediating role of team
leaders empowering behavior according to Baron and Kenny (1986). We
rst examined the direct effects of the independent variables (i.e., team
leaders EI, agreeableness, and openness) on the mediator (i.e., team leaders

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1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
a

Descriptive Statistics and Intercorrelations among Measuresa.

Variables

Mean

SD

Age
Sexb
Education levelc
Tenure
Openness to new experience
Agreeableness
Leaders emotional intelligence
Leaders empowering behavior
Team climate

43.70
1.51
4.18
12.15
4.02
5.49
3.91
3.73
3.60

5.45
.50
1.03
5.03
1.03
.88
0.41
.63
.45

.11
.16
.57
.21
.12
.03
.05
.16

.14
.17
.02
.08
.16
.06
.04

.27
.17
.07
.05
.07
.11

.22
.17
.06
.16
.11

.11
.22
.01
.09

.28
.27
.29

.27
.30

.43

pr.05; pr.01 (two-tailed);

1 for female and 2 for male;
c
Educational level (1 primary school; 2 middle school; 3 technical school; 4 high school/vocational high school; 5 college/
undergraduate; 6 graduate school).
b

Team Leaders Emotional Intelligence, Personality, and Empowering Behavior

Table 1.

93

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DONG LIU ET AL.

empowering behavior). We then tested the direct effects of the mediator on

the dependent variable (i.e., team climate). Finally, with the direct effects of
the independent variables and the mediator accounted for, we gauged the
reduction in the beta coefcients associated with the independent variables.

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RESULTS
Table 1 shows the descriptive statistics and intercorrelations among the
measures in this study. In general, the correlations among the variables were
expected save several exceptions. Team leaders empowering behavior was
positively correlated with agreeableness (r .27, po.01) and EI (r .27,
po.01). Team climate was positively correlated with team leaders
agreeableness (r .29, po.01), EI (r .30, po.01) and empowering
behavior (r .43, po.01), respectively. Consistent with the past studies,
the correlations of EI with agreeableness and openness to new experience
were moderate (r .22, po.05 and r .28, po.01). This suggests that ones
EI and personality are two separable constructs as the prior studies have

Table 2.

Results of Hierarchical Regression Analyses a.

Dependent Variable
Leaders empowering
behavior

Step 1
Age
Sex
Education level
Tenure
Step 2
Openness to new experience
Agreeableness
Leaders emotional intelligence
Step 3
Leaders empowering behavior
R2
R2 change
a

pr.10; pr.05 (two-tailed).

Team climate

Model 1

Model 2

Model 3

Model 4

Model 5

.01
.20
.16
.26

.00
.20
.16
.27

.30
.03
.17
.35

.25
.02
.16
.36

.26
.05
.11
.27

.12
.21
.27

.11
.13
.20

.03
.25
.22
.10

.23
.14

.10

.26
.16

.34
.34
.08

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Team Leaders Emotional Intelligence, Personality, and Empowering Behavior

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already veried (e.g., Davies et al., 1998; Law et al., 2004). Unexpectedly,
however, openness to new experience did not correlate with team leaders
empowering behavior (r .01, ns) and team climate (r .09, ns).
Table 2 shows the testing results for all of the hypotheses. Hypotheses 1,
2, and 3 posit that team leaders EI, agreeableness, and openness to new
experience would be positively related to team climate. The results shown in
Model 4 of Table 2 provide support for Hypotheses 1 and 2 while
Hypothesis 3 was rejected. Specically, leaders EI and agreeableness had a
signicant, positive relationship with positive team climate (b .27, pr.05,
and b .21, pr.10, respectively). On the other hand, openness to new
experience has a nonsignicant relationship to team climate (b .12, ns).
Next, we examined the relationships between the antecedents and the
proposed mediator. First, Hypothesis 4 posits that a team leaders EI is
positively related to their empowering behavior. The ndings in Model 2 of
Table 2 support this hypothesis as the team leaders EI was positively related
to their empowering behavior (b .22, pr.10). Similarly, the results in
Model 2 of Table 2 also supported Hypothesis 5, which proposes that a
team leaders agreeableness would be positively related to his or her
empowering behavior (b .25, pr.05). Unexpectedly, however, the
proposed positive association between team leaders openness to new
experiences and their empowering behavior (Hypothesis 6) was not
signicant (b .03, ns).
Finally, we tested the last set of hypotheses regarding the mediating role
of team leaders empowering behavior. Since both Hypotheses 3 and 6 were
rejected, the mediating role of team leaders empowering behavior between
team leaders openness to new experience and team climate (Hypothesis 7c)
was thus not supported. Then, as noted above for Hypotheses 1 and 2, team
leaders EI and agreeableness were signicantly related to team leaders
empowering behavior, which satised the condition that the independent
variable is related to the mediator (Baron & Kenny, 1986; Kenny, Kashy, &
Bolger, 1998). The second condition that the mediator is associated with the
dependent variable was also met. The results of Model 5 presented in
Table 2 illustrate that team leaders empowering behavior was positively
related to team climate (b .34, pr.05). When a team leaders empowering
behavior was included in Model 5, the beta coefcients associated with team
leaders EI reduces from .27, pr.05 to .20, pr.10; and meanwhile, the
relationship between agreeableness and team climate became nonsignicant.
The above results indicate that empowering behavior acted as a partial
mediator of the relationship between team leaders EI and team climate, and
a full mediator of the relationship between team leaders agreeableness and

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DONG LIU ET AL.

team climate. Overall, the mediating effects of Hypotheses 7a and 7b were

supported but Hypothesis 7c was negated.

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DISCUSSION
This study presents the rst attempt to ll in a gap in the empowerment
literature by linking team leaders traits and ability simultaneously to their
empowering behavior. We also go a step further by connecting team leaders
empowering behavior to an important team outcome team climate, and
investigating the potential mediating role that empowering behavior plays
in the team empowerment process. Our research examining the general
team outcome (i.e., climate) adds to the existing empowerment literature
because most previous empowerment studies had concentrated on either
intrapersonal outcomes of empowerment such as job satisfaction and
turnover (Spreitzer, Kizilos, & Nason, 1997; Thomas & Tymon, 1994), or
interpersonal outcomes such as change-oriented leadership (Spreitzer et al.,
1999). In addition, as noted by Arnold et al. (2000), empowerment research
would make progress by exploring the effects of specic empowering
behaviors of supervisors rather than focusing entirely on the empowerment
feeling of subordinates, because followers may emulate empowering leaders
values, goals, and behavior and then transform themselves as well. This
chapter is an attempt toward such direction. The ndings of this chapter are
also of value to leadership research and practice in terms of its research
design: that is, we used three sources to report information on key variables
so as to reduce common method variance.

Implications for Theory and Practice

Consistent with most of our hypotheses, the empirical results show team
leaders agreeableness and EI predict positive team climate, and their effects
are fully or partially mediated by team leaders empowering behavior. The
present study thus extends past trait leadership research by suggesting that
leaders personality and ability (EI) can be used simultaneously to predict
leadership effectiveness. For organizations, in accordance with the person
organization t framework (Cable & Judge, 1997; Schneider, 1987), our
results imply that rms are able to exert some degree of control over the
team empowerment process and team climate by selecting the right team
leaders. Furthermore, EI literature indicates EI can be increased through

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training and even espoused as a revolutionary means to enhance

organizational performance (George, 2000; Prati et al., 2003). Based on
our ndings, organizations can, therefore, promote desirable team outcomes
by training team leaders EI to encourage empowering behavior even after
assigning leaders to teams. For team leaders, our results suggest that it is
benecial for them to enhance their EI and empowering behaviors in order
to improve their leadership effectiveness.
Unexpectedly, we did not nd the signicant effects of team leaders
openness to new experience on team leaders empowering behavior and team
climate. The result is contradictory to most of the past research (e.g., Bass,
1990; Judge et al., 2002; Yukl, 1998), in which openness to new experience
was of strong predictive power for leaders behavior. The characteristics of
Chinese culture may need to be taken into account when exploring a reason
for this inconsistency in that our study was conducted in Hong Kong, and the
survey participants were all Chinese. Traditional Chinese values emphasize
harmony and discourage conicts (Liu, Chen, & Yao, 2011). This aspect of
social behavior has been discussed extensively by social psychologists in
conjunction with studies as to conict avoidance and conict resolution
(Bond & Hwang, 1986; Bond & Wang, 1983). Conict-stirring and aggressive
behaviors are thought to be avoided because they communicate interpersonal
hostility and damage mutual interaction. Studies have indicated that strong,
cooperative relationships, bolstered by social face and warmth, are the
foundation upon which Chinese people develop interpersonal relations within
teams (e.g., Tjosvold, Hui, & Sun, 2004). Team leaders scoring high on
openness to new experience are divergent thinkers (McCrae, 1996), display
independence of judgment and autonomy (Woodman, Sawyer, & Grifn,
1993), and may be inclined to use unconventional methods to promote
aggressive changes within their teams (McCrae & Costa, 1987). New ideas
and changes may also challenge the status quo and undermine the harmony,
which often results in conicts among Chinese team members, because
Chinese have been more inclined to conform to the established norms and
avoid controversy (Tjosvold, Hui, Ding, & Hu, 2003). Thus, the behaviors of
open team leaders may give rise to anxiety, mistrust, and disagreement in
Chinese teams, which are in controversy with such traditional Chinese virtues
as conict avoidance and harmony maintenance, thereby counteracting the
positive effects of leaders openness to new experience on empowering
behaviors and team climate. Future research may further investigate this
potential difference as a result of Chinese culture.
Consistent with previous research, the results of our study also show that
EI is related to, but distinct from, the Big Five personality dispositions. Our

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results showed that EI predicts both team leaders empowering behaviors

and team climate. After controlling for related variables and personality
traits (agreeableness and openness to new experience), EI still accounts for
3% of the variance in team leaders empowering behavior and 5.5% of the
variance in team climate. As our research design has reduced the effect of
common method variances, it may give more condence to EI researchers
concerning the potential utility of the EI construct in the contexts of teams.

Limitations and Future Directions

The results of the study should also be interpreted in light of its limitations.
First, in terms of its research design, as with the majority of other EI and
personality studies, this research utilizes cross-sectional data. Thus, despite
the theoretically inferred causal relationships depicted in Fig. 1, we can only
settle for an association between the variables. In particular, the direction of
the causality between team leaders empowering behavior and team climate
may be the reversed one: positive team climate may inspire team leaders to
display empowering behavior. Future research design may employ longitudinal survey data or laboratory and eld experiments to trace the causal
direction of the variables. Another issue has to do with the level of data and
analysis. In this research, the data were collected from individuals. Although
it is appropriate to ask the team leader rather than any single team member to
evaluate the overall team climate, different levels of conceptualization and
analysis of this construct may be further conducted if we can have the climate
measures from all team members. For example, the consensus and agreement
of perceived team climate by members within a team may be examined. This
type of design and analysis should be considered in further research.
Second, some contextual and situational factors not included in our
investigation may moderate or mediate the established links among our
variables. Openness to new experience may be particularly effective in the
work environment with high dynamics (De Hoogh et al., 2005), because the
dynamic environment offers a high degree of challenge and opportunities for
change, which require new perspectives and novel responses. For instance,
Ployhart and colleagues (2001) found that openness to new experience
explained variance in charismatic leadership but only in more challenging
conditions. Additionally, leaders agreeableness may be less relevant for
intrinsically satisfying tasks because the task itself provides positive feedback
and encouragement (Tobin, Graziano, Vanman, & Tassinary, 2000). Leader
member exchange may mediate the associations of leaders personality and EI

Team Leaders Emotional Intelligence, Personality, and Empowering Behavior

99

to their specic behaviors toward subordinates (Liden & Maslyn, 1998).

Future research may explore the moderating and mediating effects of these
contextual and situational variables highlighted above.

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CONCLUSION
In spite of the limitations discussed above, the ndings of our study reveal
that there are behavioral implications stemming from team leaders
dispositions (agreeableness and openness) and ability (EI) in terms of the
team empowerment process and collective team outcome (team climate).
While more studies, especially cross-cultural ones, are needed to establish
the generalizability of our ndings, the results of this chapter show that the
disposition and ability of the team leader can help facilitate positive team
outcome via leaders empowerment behaviors. For future research, we hope
our ndings have shed some light on the behavioral implications of leaders
EI and personality to team outcomes as well as the complex nature of the
empowerment process in teams.

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