“求无过”的领导如何让下属更加主动

How Can a Leader Seeking no Faults Make Subordinates more Proactive

“求无过”是领导者在管理过程中一种常见的动机,这种动机既可以保证企业正常运营,也可以约束领导者个人言行;但是,这样的动机可能会造成下属对错误和失败的担忧与恐惧,从而不敢去主动开拓工作。本文借用心理学中防御型调节焦点这一概念来描述领导者“求无过”的动机,并基于失败学习的视角提出,高防御型调节焦点的领导可以通过在团队中塑造失败学习的氛围来促进下属的主动性。基于对62个团队和261个下属进行的两轮问卷调查,发现当团队的权力距离较低时,领导的防御型调节焦点有助于在团队中形成失败学习的氛围,使下属表现出更多的工作主动性并投入到创新活动中去。

Leaders are motivated to avoid mistakes and failures in their management practice.This motivation benefits the organizational operation and prevents leaders from engaging in improper behaviors.However,such a motivation makes leaders reluctant to seize opportunities or proactively seek change.Consequently,in the long run,organization’s performance may be harmed.In this paper,we utilize the concept of“prevention focus”to describe this motivation.Individuals with high prevention focus pay more attention to safety and obligations and strive to avoid mistakes and losses.Previous research indicated that leaders with higher levels of prevention focus may excessively emphasize mistakes and losses to their subordinates.They might frequently provide negative feedback and enforce restrict rules,potentially limiting their subordinates’proactivity.In this paper,we propose a novel perspective suggesting that leaders’prevention focus can promote subordinates’proactivity through cultivating a team climate of learning from failure.According to the theory of learning from failure,two conditions are required to foster the climate of learning from failure:1)failure should receive sufficient attention;2)employees need to move beyond failure and re-engage in their work.We argue that if leaders with higher levels of prevention focus are matched with teams characterized by lower power distance,the above two conditions can be met,benefiting the development of a climate of learning from failure within the team.In particular,leaders with higher levels of prevention focus may continuously remind their subordinates to be cautious about mistakes and losses,while lower levels of power distance reduce the pressure subordinates feel from authority,leading to less anxiety about failure.Lower levels of power distance also allow for more open discussions.Under these circumstances,subordinates,while paying attention to failure,devote more energy to learning from failure rather than being trapped in the fear of failure.Additionally,learning from failure is future-oriented.During this process,team members not only discuss,identify,and analyze the reasons for failure together,but also strive to make progress through deliberate experimentation,thereby increasing their proactivity.We adopted the survey method to test our theoretical model.The sample was from 78 work teams in a large pharmaceutical company located in eastern China.The research team communicated with the leaders in the company and obtained the name list of the participants with the help of HR department.To avoid common method biases,data were collected from multiple sources at two different time points,with one-month interval between them.The leaders’regulatory focus was reported by themselves and other main variables(i.e.,team power distance,learning from failure climate,personal initiatives,and engagement in creative process)were reported by subordinates.After matching the data,the final dataset consists of 62 workgroups,with a total of 62 leaders and 261 subordinates.All measurements used in the study were established scales from previous literature.Before hypotheses testing,we conducted CFA and CMV test,and then employed the multi-level path analysis in Mplus 7.0 to examine the proposed model.We found that,at the team level,team power distance moderated the relationship between leaders’prevention focus and team climate of learning from failure.More specifically,when team power distance was low,leaders’prevention focus was positively associated with the team climate of learning from failure;while when team power distance was high,leaders’prevention focus was not significantly related to team climate of learning from failure.Further cross-level analysis indicated that team climate of learning from failure was positively related to subordinates’proactivity,characterized by personal initiative and engagement in creative process.Team power distance moderated the mediating effects of team climate of learning from failure on the relationships between leaders’prevention focus and subordinates’proactivity in terms of personal initiatives and engagement in creative process.In particular,when the level of team power distance was low,the mediating effect of team climate of learning from failure was significant;however,when the level of team power distance was high,the mediating effect of team climate of learning from failure was not significant.To sum up,all the theoretical hypotheses in the study were supported by the empirical results.This research contributes to the current literature in three ways.First,previous literature on prevention focus suggested that prevention focus might lead to negative outcomes.Leaders with high prevention focus increase subordinates’prevention focus through the modeling effect,thereby leading to followers’risk aversion,resistance to change,and decreased creativity.These studies implied a premise that leaders’emphasis on negative results to subordinates would reduce their psychological safety.Building on the theory of learning from failure,this research reveals that prevention focus can also have positive influence,depending on the context in which the leaders convey their motivations.When the team climate encourages team members to focus on failure without fearing its negative consequences,and fosters a climate of learning from failure,leaders’prevention focus can actually enhance rather than deter subordinates’proactivity.Thus,this research extends prior studies on regulatory focus through the lens of the theory of learning from failure.Second,whereas previous research on learning form failure has concentrated on the strategy domain,such as the individual-level(e.g.,entrepreneurs’)learning from failure or the firm-level learning from failure,this research introduces learning from failure into the domain of organizational research.It explores the antecedents and outcomes of learning from failure at the team level.In addition,this research identifies team power distance as a team-level contextual boundary condition that helps cultivate the climate of learning from failure.Third,previous literature on antecedents of proactivity primarily focused on positive leadership behaviors,such as transformational leadership or leader-member exchange.This research demonstrates that by fostering a team climate of learning from failure,even seemingly negative and passive leadership characteristics like the prevention focus can enhance subordinates’proactivity.Thus,this research extends the understanding of the development of proactivity.This research holds important practical implications as well.For example,it offers an insightful perspective on leaders’motivation in emphasizing and avoiding negative outcomes.While it is commonly believed that leaders’prevention focus might decrease subordinates’proactivity,this study suggests that if leaders could redirect subordinates’attention from fearing failure to learning from failure,they can break the cycle of“leaders fear of failure-subordinate reduced proactivity-organizational inefficiency and increased likelihood of failure”.