Abstract:

In an era of intensifying talent competition and rapid organizational transformation, leader strengths use has become increasingly central to sustaining team performance and adaptability. Although leader strengths use has attracted growing scholarly attention, important limitations remain. Specifically, prevailing conceptualizations are largely derived from Western contexts, offering limited insight into the structure of leader strengths use in Chinese organizational contexts. In addition, existing research has focused primarily on the outcomes of leader strengths use, particularly short-term, individual-level performance, while paying relatively little attention to its antecedents and to its broader effects at the team level. This lack of conceptual clarity and multilevel perspective limits our understanding of how strengths-based leadership practices are formed and how they shape broader organizational functioning. To address these limitations, this study clarifies the conceptualization of leader strengths use and examines its antecedents, dynamic processes, and multilevel consequences.
Grounded in the social construction of leadership theory, this study clarifies the construct of leader strengths use as a socially constructed leadership process rather than a narrow form of support for subordinates’ strengths use. Leader strengths use is defined as a multidimensional leadership behavior through which leaders model the use of their own strengths, activate followers’ strengths, and coordinate complementary strengths within the team. This formulation extends prior work in two respects. It moves beyond conceptualizations centered solely on support for followers’ strengths use, and it treats strengths coordination as part of the construct itself rather than as a downstream consequence. To establish the construct, this study combines grounded theory and scale development to establish the conceptual domain of leader strengths use and to develop a measure with sound psychometric properties. In doing so, this study specifies the construct more precisely and anchors it in three core dimensions: strengths modeling, strengths activation, and strengths coordination.
Building on this conceptual foundation, we further propose that leader strengths use is shaped by the joint influence of organizational, leader, and follower conditions. Rather than treating antecedents as independent predictors, we adopt a configurational perspective and argue that multiple combinations of conditions may give rise to leader strengths use. At the organizational level, developmental human resource practices are expected to provide normative support and resources that legitimize strengths-based leadership. At the leader level, proactive personality and leader strengths knowledge are proposed to shape leaders’ beliefs about human potential and their capability to identify and mobilize strengths. At the follower level, perceived subordinate competence is expected to influence leaders’ judgments about the feasibility of strengths-based allocation and coordination. To examine these interdependent conditions, we propose to use fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to identify configurational antecedents and equifinal pathways to high levels of leader strengths use. In addition, we conceptualize leader strengths use as a dynamic process rather than a static behavioral tendency. Drawing on self-determination theory, we propose that engaging in strengths use enhances leaders’ motivation, which in turn increases the likelihood of subsequent strengths use, forming a self-reinforcing gain cycle.
Finally, we advance a multilevel perspective on the consequences of leader strengths use. Building on the leadership process model, we propose that leader strengths use influences job performance at both the individual and team levels, and that these effects are contingent on key boundary conditions. At the team level, we argue that the congruence between leader strengths use and organizational support for strengths use shapes positive team processes, including shared strengths awareness, trust, and coordination, which in turn are expected to influence team commitment, performance, and innovation over time. At the individual level, we propose that leader strengths use affects subordinates’ performance and innovation through strengths-based job crafting, with these effects contingent on contextual factors such as career insecurity and career future time perspective. To test these propositions, we outline a multi-method empirical strategy combining multi-wave multisource surveys, polynomial regression with response surface analysis, and experimental designs.
Collectively, this research makes several contributions. First, it advances a more precise conceptualization of leader strengths use grounded in a Chinese context. Second, it introduces a configurational and dynamic perspective to explain the antecedents of leader strengths use and its evolution over time. Third, it develops a multilevel theoretical account of the consequences and boundary conditions of leader strengths use. By bringing together insights on construct development, antecedents, processes, and outcomes, this study provides a useful foundation for future empirical research on leader strengths use and talent management in organizations.

Key words: leader strengths use, social construction of leadership theory, positive team processes, talent management, innovation