新任管理者的工作挑战、自我反思与领导力发展之间的影响关系

Study on relationship among new managers’job challenges,self-reflection,and leadership development

当前组织环境中,工作经历成为管理者发展领导能力的重要来源。本文以新任管理者培训计划为研究情景,通过内容分析方法对其学习周记进行编码以获取纵向的量化数据。在此基础上,文章基于经历驱动的领导力发展理论,分析管理者个体间初始水平与变动率的差异,构建潜增长模型检验新任管理者面临的工作挑战和自我反思与自愿离职、领导能力发展等结果变量的关系,揭示出新任管理者如何通过主动行为完成对领导角色的认同和适应。研究结果发现:(1)工作挑战初始水平通过自我反思的初始水平间接影响主动行为的初始水平,并且工作挑战在个体内部增长率通过自我反思的增长率间接影响主动行为的增长率与自愿离职;(2)自我反思的初始水平通过主动行为的初始水平间接影响领导行为的初始水平,并且个体内部自我反思的增长率通过主动行为的增长率间接影响领导行为的增长率。本研究对于从个体的自我反思角度认识领导力发展过程具有理论启示价值。

The drastic development of economics and technology has brought about a changeable and high-risky market environment.Compared with the formal training program,work experience has become vital for managers to develop leadership in the current environment.Managers learn in a current work situation and draw lessons that can be applied to new situations.Through this process,managers can develop individual abilities and promote performance.A challenging job,based on experience-driven development theory,can provide managers with developmental opportunities,such as boosting learning behavior,improving potentialities,and acquiring positive performance evaluations.Most previous experience-driven development literature designed the research from a straight-forward view,which analyzed how job challenges prompt leadership development through a"stimulation-response"frame.However,in the face of inner complexity and uncertainty of job challenges,recent research showed that not all leaders could draw lessons from recent work experience and apply them to new situations.Leaders who fail to develop a highly effective response to job challenges are often trapped in an adverse situation for leadership development.The mixing results can not be reconciled in the view of the"stimulation-response"frame.Therefore,some researchers try to explain the phenomena through the lens of cognition.Job challenges can result in cognitive conflicts among individuals.Only when driven by internal growth needs and learning motivation are people willing to invest cognitive resources to eliminate such conflicts.A stream of literature pointed out that self-reflection,a kind of frequent cognitive activity,plays an essential role in explaining leadership development.Self-reflection,the inspection,and evaluation of one’s thoughts,feelings,and behavior,is regarded as a cognitive process to enhance understanding of one’s previous experience and a mechanism to transform challenging experience into knowledge.Reflection helps individuals reconstruct previous experience and provide them insights into why they performed specific emotional reactions and behavior.A reflection is a tool for bridging past experiences and current events.People can learn from experiences and apply them to new tasks.However,little experimental evidence supports this mechanism in prior research.Another deficiency in leadership development research is the lack of attention to the continuation of experience.Intraindividual change of self-cognition and competence over time is the essence of the change phenomenon hypothesized to occur in the individual managers’development process.The process of experience shaping an individual is continuous.Therefore,the research needs to take a time variable into due consideration.Compared to current management development,new managers encounter several new difficulties to develop leadership.New incomers are unfamiliar with their roles and expected behavior.The surprise is a crucial feature of organizational entry.New managers explore to understand how and when to do their duties.They may have two kinds of responses:voluntary turnover and socialization.However,experience-driven leadership development theory pays little attention to the development of new managers.In summary,researchers delivered a series of empirical articles on experience-driven leadership development,and took job challenges and self-reflection into consideration.However,the current research directs little attention to how job challenges advance managers’developmental outcomes,especially how new managers acquire developmental experience.Therefore,this research mainly investigates the following three questions:(1)whether self-reflection is the underlying mechanism of the effect of job challenges on individual development?(2)whether continuation of experience can provide an incremental explanation for the way of experience-driven development?(3)whether job challenges can promote new managers’development?Many vital leadership development questions cannot be answered without an adequate conceptualization and assessment of intraindividual change.Therefore,dynamic data is vital for conducting empirical research on experience-driven leadership development.New manager’s adaptation is dynamic progress,and therefore absolute or average level data cannot capture the systematic change of the progress.How to collect data is the major challenge in this research area.Prior research lacked related dynamic data since the survey is an after-event research method,challenging to capture the response process to a specific event.This research applied scenario-oriented content analysis to collect dynamic data.To specify,the research scenario focused on the training plan from Wowprime for new store managers(i.e.,lion plan).We conducted a content analysis to investigate 3322 copies of learning reports from 293 new managers and collected 12 rounds of dynamic data from the process.Also,we acquired turn over information from the film’s files.This research constructed a latent growth model to analyze the dynamic data.The results show that the initial level of job challenges exerted indirect effects on the initial level of proactive behavior via the initial level of self-reflection.The intraindividual slope of job changes exerted indirect effects on voluntary turnover and the slope of proactive behavior via the slope of self-reflection.The results also reveal that the initial level of self-reflection yieldes indirect effects on the initial level of leadership behavior via the initial level of proactive behavior.The intraindividual slope of self-reflection yields indirect effects on the slope of leadership behavior via the slope of proactive behavior.This research uses job challenges’initial level and intraindividual slope to reflect the interindividual differences in the cognition on job challenges.It then explores the role of interindividual differences in self-reflection and proactive behavior.First,the paper opens the black box of the"stimulation-response"process in experience-driven leadership development from individual cognition.Second,the results reveal that self-reflection is a key mechanism for leadership development by promoting learning.Third,the research explains new managers’leadership development process based on role identity theory.Forth,the research finds that continuation is the key characteristic of experience to affect and change individual habits.