团队领导行为与团队心理安全:以信任为中介变量的研究

Team Leadership, Trust and Team Psychological Safety:A Mediation Analysis

已有的团队领导研究着重于领导行为对团队绩效的影响,而缺乏其作用机制和路径的研究。本文以142个团队为样本,选取信任与团队心理安全两个变量,对团队领导行为是否以及如何通过信任影响团队心理安全进行实证研究。研究结果表明:转换型领导行为与团队心理安全之间存在正相关关系,显著地影响团队心理安全感;信任是形成团队心理安全感的重要因素之一,在团队领导行为、团队心理安全感之间的中介效应显著。

In the background of new economy, the team problem has aroused widespread concern. Being the information communicator and behavior coordinator, how do team leaders build the harmonious atmosphere of mutual trust and encourage team members to venture to innovate and concentrate on work so as to reduce the interpersonal risk？ How do team leaders reduce the members’ differences in perception caused by themselves and raise members’ importance in their mind？ How to cultivate the relationship between team leaders and their members？ What is the connection between trust and team psychological safety？ The purpose of this paper is to give some answers to the above questions. The existing literature of team leadership has focused on its direct impact on team performance, but lacked the study on its interactive mechanism and path. Using 142 teams as the sample, we selected trust and team psychological safety as two psychological variables, then analyzed whether and how team leadership affected team psychological safety through the mediator of trust. SPSS 15.0 and Amos 7.0 were used for analysis. The results are： （1）Correlation analysis shows that there is a significant correlation between transformational leadership and team psychological safety;especially, transformational leadership has a significant influence on team psychological safety, that is, the four regression coefficients of transformational leadership respectively are： individualized consideration（β=.438, p〈.01）, intellectual stimulation （β=.253, p.05）, inspirational motivation（β=.311, p〈.01）, idealized influence（β=.328, p〈.01）. However, transactional leadership has no significant correlation with team psychological safety. （2） Regression analysis shows that trust is a key factor to form team psychological safety, that is, the two regression coefficients of trust are： interpersonal trust（β=.254, p〈0.05）, system trust（β=.191, p〈0.05）; （3） Mediator analysis shows that trust exercises a significantly moderate impact between team leadership and team psychological safety. It means that team leadership not only influences team psychological safety, but, to a great extent, plays an intermediary role through trust. However, the mediator effects are different. Interpersonal trust in part plays a mediator role between team leadership and team psychological safety, and system trust on the whole. The implications of the findings are also discussed in this paper. According to the results of the analysis, the paper provides some advice to team leader and human resources management practice as well. Firstly, team leader types should match team members’ demands when organizations prepare to build a team. Secondly, the result shows that transformational leadership is beneficial to form and strengthens team psychological safety; therefore, it is highly important for team leaders to change and cultivate their style of leadership intentionally. Thirdly, team leaders play a key role in establishing a supportive and trust atmosphere. They can provide trust support, informational support, instrumental support and other forms of support to help team members form the sense of organizational support. The innovation of the paper is （1） introducing trust as a mediator variable to test and verify the relationship between team leadership and team psychological safety; （2）different from other research, we focus more on the antecedents rather than just on the outcome variables of team psychological safety, which is useful to explore the formation of team members’ mental mechanism.