关键词: 自我领导, 驱动机制, 多层次模型, 垂滴效应, 概念拓展

Abstract:

Currently, business organizations are continuously promoting changes in organizational structure and methods of work. Meanwhile, employees are also increasingly pursuing their own values and goals. Therefore, individual self-leadership has become an important and evolving research topic in organizational management research. Individual self-leadership not only contributes to organizational development and personal performance improvement but is also closely related to self-growth in uncertain times. It is thus necessary to investigate the driving factors and mechanisms of self-leadership. A literature review of extant studies found that the current concept of self-leadership is mostly based on classical control theory, emphasizing the process of self-control and influence. However, its relatively broad content means that it has been difficult to accurately reflect new meanings of self-leadership. At the same time, empirical research on the antecedents of individual self-leadership has been limited to a single level, without considering multi-level interactions. More importantly, existing research fails to fully address the motivational processes behind the antecedents of self-leadership.

With this practical and theoretical background, this study aims to initially answer the core scientific question of "how does individual self-leadership form" through three closely related theoretical studies. Firstly, the present study defines and expands the conceptualization of individual self-leadership, and develops a reliable and valid scale for it. On the one hand, the concept of individual self-leadership has undergone substantive changes in this period of new management practice; on the other hand, the existing definition and measurement of self-leadership have been criticized because it is too broad and has insufficient reliability and validity. To this end, this study intends to reconceptualize self-leadership by building on a grounded analysis of new management practices. Furthermore, through conducting qualitative interviews and following a scale development process, Study 1 aims to develop and validate a new scale for individual self-leadership. Secondly, starting from the intrinsic motivation-driven nature of self-leadership, Study 2 theoretically investigates the influence of individual cognitive characteristics and team leadership style on the formation of individual self-leadership. Specifically, this study initially proposes that employees' belief in leadership co-creation promotes individual self-leadership by inspiring their personal goal strivings, and team empowering leadership promotes self-leadership by satisfying employees' psychological need for autonomy. Further, team leaders’ empowering leadership behaviors will also strengthen the impact of employees’ beliefs in leadership co-creation on self-leadership, resulting in a cross-level moderation model. Finally, Study 3 examines the influence mechanism of organizational contexts and team self-leadership on individual self-leadership, so as to develop a trickle-down effect model. Specifically, this study proposes that organizational shared vision and autonomy support climate can work together to enhance team self-leadership, which can further motivate individual self-leadership. In addition, the positive effect of team self-leadership on individual self-leadership will be enhanced in the context of high task interdependence and high adoption of telecommuting. To sum up, the integrated framework developed in this study emphasizes the multi-level influences and the motivational processes underlying the formation of individual self-leadership. It also echoes recent discussions on the paradoxical feature of self-leadership.

Our research is expected to make theoretical contributions to the self-leadership literature in the following ways. This research enriches and expands the concept of self-leadership, better reflecting the changes in management practices, and also provides a clearer concept and scale with accepted reliability and validity for subsequent studies. On this basis, the theoretical exploration of the formation mechanism of individual self-leadership provides a foundation for developing a multi-level theoretical framework of self-leadership, thereby helping to deepen the understanding of self-leadership in the academic world and management practice. However, given the conceptual nature of the current study, we call for further empirical examinations of self-leadership and its formation mechanisms. Future studies could also consider the role of self-leadership in digitalization transformation and artificial intelligence-driven contexts.

Key words: self-leadership, motivational mechanism, multi-level model, trickle-down effect, conceptual extension