Directive versus participative leadership: Dispositional antecedents and team consequences. Issue 3 (24th March 2018) - Li, Guiquan
Abstract : Directive leadership and participative leadership are two fundamental sets of behaviours leaders employ to manage teams, yet little is known about their antecedents. Drawing on regulatory mode theory, we propose that team leaders high in locomotion orientation – the dispositional propensity to control movements and carry them forward – prefer directive leadership to 'keep moving', while team leaders high in assessment orientation – the dispositional propensity to compare between means and options – prefer participative leadership to 'get the best'. We further hypothesize that directive leadership increases team efficiency but decreases team creativity, whereas participative leadership increases team creativity but decreases team efficiency. Based on multisource and time‐lagged data from 75 management consulting project teams, regression and bootstrapping results support most of the hypotheses. Supplementary analysis reveals that participative leadership has an inverted U‐shaped relationship with team efficiency when directive leadership is low, implying that leadership is a complex behavioural process rather than a simple choice between seemingly contradictory behaviours. We discuss the findings' implications for the leadership, regulatory mode, and team literature. Practitioner Points: Leaders should be aware of both the bright and the dark sides of leadership behaviours. Leaders high in locomotion personality should incorporate participative leadership behaviours such as listening to suggestions and communicating with followers in decision‐making when directive leadership behaviours are not functional. Leaders high in assessment personality should spend more attention to the pace of teamwork by incorporating directive leadership behaviours such as giving clear orders and addressing deadlines.