آیا رهبران اصیل در ارتباط با پرهیزکاری بیشتر ، تیم های متعهد و قوی هستند ؟

Through a team-level analysis, the study shows how authentic leadership (AL) predicts team potency both directly and through the mediating role of team virtuousness and team affective commitment. Data about AL and team virtuousness were collected two months before data collection on team affective commitment and team potency. Fifty-one teams were selected for testing the hypotheses. The main findings are the following: (a) AL predicts team affective commitment through the mediating role of team virtuousness; (b) team virtuousness predicts team potency through the mediating role of team affective commitment; (c) AL predicts team potency through the mediating role of team virtuousness and team affective commitment. By focusing on two positive constructs (AL and team virtuousness), for which interrelations have rarely been explored, the study contributes to the Positive Organizational Scholarship movement, and suggests that AL and virtuousness are good in themselves and also potential facilitators of team success.

Team potency, the collectively-shared belief of a team that it can be effective (Lester et al., 2002 and Shea and Guzzo, 1987), can be a very powerful motivator1 (Gibson & Earley, 2007). Team potency differs from collective efficacy in that collective efficacy “concerns individuals' beliefs not necessarily shared by others. Thus, potency is an attribute of groups whereas collective efficacy is an attribute of individuals” (Guzzo, Yost, Campbell, & Shea, 1993, p. 90; for a discussion about differences between team potency and related constructs, see Stajkovic, Lee, & Nyberg, 2009). Team potency influences a team to initiate action, the effort levels the team exerts for reaching goals, and how long the team's efforts are sustained. The topic has been investigated in several settings (organizational, educational, sports, military; Stajkovic et al., 2009). In organizational settings, team potency relates to variables such as team problem solving, team learning, service performance, and team performance (e.g., Bandura, 1997, De Jong et al., 2005, Kirkman and Rosen, 1999, Lester et al., 2002, Shea and Guzzo, 1987 and Sivasubramaniam et al., 2002; see Stajkovic et al., 2009 for a synthesis). However, little is known about the factors promoting team potency (Gibson and Earley, 2007 and Lester et al., 2002). Guzzo et al. (1993) suggested that leadership is a key determinant of team potency, but empirical studies are scarce (Howell & Shea, 2006). In this paper we focus on authentic leadership (AL) as predictor of team potency. The apparent degradation in the quality of the “overall moral fabric of contemporary leadership” (Avolio & Mhatre, 2012) creates a need for new theories that, like AL, focus on promoting what is right rather than focusing only on “results at whatever cost” to the exclusion of ethical considerations. Followers', teams', and organizations' effectiveness must be promoted via authentic leadership behaviors that also help to restore trust in leaders and organizations (Avolio and Mhatre, 2012 and George, 2003). In times of a crisis of confidence (Avolio and Mhatre, 2012 and George, 2003), studying and promoting AL is crucial for developing confidence in leaders and promoting “pragmatic outcomes” (Cameron, Bright, & Caza, 2004, p. 770). Considering the impact of team potency on team performance (Stajkovic et al., 2009), team potency may be considered to be a “pragmatic outcome” of AL, as we discuss below. AL is a subject of growing interest among scholars (e.g., Avolio and Gardner, 2005, Walumbwa et al., 2008 and Walumbwa et al., 2011) and practitioners (e.g., George, 2003). Both argue that AL promotes positive attitudes and behaviors of employees and contributes to individual and organizational/team performance. More empirical research is necessary for further testing this assertion. Although several empirical studies have been conducted for predicting individual level outcomes (Rego et al., 2012a, Walumbwa et al., 2010 and Walumbwa et al., 2008), studies are scarcer in predicting team level outcomes (Walumbwa et al., 2011). In consonance with Avolio, Gardner, Walumbwa, Luthans, and May, 2004, we consider that AL, although important, is not sufficient to achieve positive team outcomes. There is a process linking AL to team potency, and we suggest that team virtuousness and team affective commitment may be part of that process. We hypothesize that AL nurtures team virtuousness, which in turn promotes team affective commitment (Avolio, Gardner, Walumbwa, Luthans and May, 2004, Rego et al., 2010 and Rego et al., 2011) and, in this way, team potency. Both team commitment and team virtuousness are potential mediators, with research suggesting that both predict team performance (Neininger et al., 2010 and Palanski et al., 2011). Team commitment is analogous to organizational commitment, except that the target of the psychological attachment is the team, not the organization. There is reason to believe that team commitment contributes more to the prediction of team-related criteria such as team potency than does organizational commitment (Den Hartog & Belschak, 2007; Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975; Riketta & Van Dick, 2005). AL may encourage team affective commitment through the mediating role of team virtuousness (Avolio, Gardner, Walumbwa, Luthans, & May, 2004). Team virtuousness refers to team contexts where “good” habits, desires, and actions (e.g., humanity, integrity, forgiveness, and trust) are practiced, supported, nourished, disseminated, and sustained, at both the individual and collective levels (Cameron et al., 2004). The topic has been “out of favor in the scientific community” (Cameron et al., 2004, p. 767) and out of the focus of practitioner attention (Rego et al., 2010). A few empirical studies have been conducted (Bright et al., 2006, Cameron et al., 2004, Rego et al., 2010 and Rego et al., 2011), but to our knowledge none has focused on both AL and team virtuousness. This is surprising considering that both are core elements of Positive Organizational Scholarship (Cameron & Spreitzer, 2012). More empirical research is necessary for “legitimizing” them in both the scholars' and practitioners' communities (Cameron & Winn, 2012). We hypothesize that AL fosters virtuous team climates, leading team members to share common positive perceptions about how virtuous the team is, which in turn increases team affective commitment and, in this way, makes the team more potent. For example, because authentic leaders set high standards for moral and ethical behavior, they nurture honesty, integrity, and trust within the team, developing positive/upward spirals within the team, making it more virtuous. Team virtuousness, in turn, creates team affective commitment (Rego et al., 2011), leading the whole team to feel more potent. Such effects may occur because, for example, team members develop meaning at work and gratitude for working in a virtuous team (Emmons & Shelton, 2001). As a consequence, they reciprocate with greater team affective commitment (Coyle-Shapiro, 2002 and Eisenberger et al., 2001). Through positive behavioral interactions within the team (Ilies, Morgeson, & Nahrgang, 2005), affective commitment translates into upward/positive collective spirals that make the team more potent.

6.1. Main findings, limitations, and future studies Most of the empirical and conceptual work investigating team potency has focused on its relationship with performance, little being known about the factors contributing to its development (Gibson and Earley, 2007 and Lester et al., 2002). Our study helps to explain the processes. The findings suggest that AL predicts team potency via the mediating role of team virtuousness and team affective commitment. Authentic leaders nourish team virtuousness, thus leading teams to develop greater team affective commitment and, in this way, team potency. The path between AL and team potency, when team virtuousness and team affective commitment are controlled, is not significant. This finding is consistent with the literature suggesting that the impact of leadership on employees and team outcomes may be fully mediated by other variables (e.g., Walumbwa et al., 2010 and Wang et al., 2005). Alternatively, one may speculate that the non-significance of the path results from the small sample size. Future studies should include a larger sample of teams to clarify this issue. On the whole, the findings show that AL stimulates team potency, a variable related to team performance (Sivasubramaniam et al., 2002 and Stajkovic et al., 2009). The findings enrich the literature about the effects of AL at the team level, and suggest that at least two mechanisms through which such effects operate are team virtuousness and team affective commitment. These constructs are underexplored in the literature, our study revealing that they deserve additional attention from researchers and practitioners. By combining AL and team virtuousness in the same model, our study also enriches the Positive Organizational Scholarship (POS) movement (Cameron & Spreitzer, 2012). Empirical studies including both constructs are, to our knowledge, non-existent. The study is not without limitations, and future studies are necessary to investigate how and why AL impact team potency and other dependent variables (e.g., team performance). First, the team sample size is small, and the size of some teams (i.e., the number of participants of the same team) is also small. The study was carried out within a single organization. Although this condition controls for extraneous influences on the teams, it limits the generalizability of our findings. Future studies should collect a larger sample, with larger team sizes (with at least three members participating in the study), operating in different organizations. Testing if the findings are replicable in teams within different kinds of organizations and sectors is also recommendable. Future studies may also include the level of interdependence within teams (Stajkovic et al., 2009) as moderator. One may suspect that AL has stronger effects on team potency in highly interdependent teams than in less interdependent ones (Gibson & Earley, 2007). Our study does not allow testing such effects because the level of interdependence was not measured. Second, although data about team affective commitment and team potency were collected two months after collecting data about AL and team virtuousness, the study does not allow an unquestionable determination of the hypothesized causality, and other causal links and explanations are plausible. For example, assuming that team potency is an enduring feature of teams, one may consider that teams with greater potency may develop dynamics that influence their leaders to behave more authentically (Sivasubramaniam et al., 2002). Although it is plausible that authentic leaders promote team virtuousness, it is also reasonable to suppose that team virtuousness promotes authenticity in leaders, or that virtuous teams reject non-authentic leaders and attract authentic ones. The fact that the reverse models (alternative models #4 and #5) have an unsatisfactory fit does not mean that reverse influences do not occur. Future studies may use a longitudinal design for clarifying these issues. Third, the study included only two mediating variables, but others are plausible. For example, it is possible that authentic leaders develop meaningful missions and visions, thus leading teams to develop a sense of purpose in what the team does (George, 2003 and Webber, 2002) and building a collective identity, which in turn leverages team potency (Shamir et al., 1993). Authentic leaders may also support intrateam psychological safety, goal clarity (Akgün et al., 2007), and collective hope, optimism, and resilience (Avolio, Gardner, Walumbwa, Luthans and May, 2004 and Walumbwa et al., 2011), thus increasing team potency. They may also encourage team affective tone (Avolio, Gardner, Walumbwa, Luthans and May, 2004 and Ilies et al., 2005), thus promoting team potency (Gibson & Earley, 2007). Future studies may include such variables as mediators. Fourth, considering that authentic, ethical, and transformational leadership constructs share some commonalities (Walumbwa et al., 2008 and Walumbwa et al., 2011), future studies should include ethical and transformational leadership for control. Fifth, instead of focusing on team potency (i.e., generalized team efficacy), future studies may focus on task-specific beliefs. It cannot be taken for granted that team efficacy beliefs across different tasks are the same (Gibson & Earley, 2007). Sixth, some aggregation indices are modest (mainly ICC2; Table 3), a finding that calls attention to the question of homogeneity/heterogeneity within teams and the homogeneous/heterogeneous effects of leaders upon team members (Waldman & Yammarino, 1999). Future studies may clarify this issue by, for example, adopting a shift-referent composition model for team affective commitment and measuring team potency through “open discussion” (Gibson & Earley, 2007), instead of a survey. Seventh: two items from the team virtuousness' original measurement instrument (one referring to trust, another to forgiveness) were removed because of psychometric reasons. We found that the correlations between the scores computed with the original items versus the scores emerging from the remaining items were very high, which suggests that the impact of removing items seems not to be empirically problematic. However, one cannot dismiss the possibility that underrepresentation of both dimensions (trust and forgiveness) on the team's virtuousness construct (Cooper & Richardson, 1986) may emerge from such a truncation of data. Future studies should deal with this issue through securing similar representations of all dimensions on the team's virtuousness construct. Eighth: future studies may include team performance as dependent variable. This would allow empirically testing a theoretically assumed, although not yet empirically validated, relationship between AL and team performance. Finally, our study corroborates the findings of Podsakoff et al. (2012), who report evidence (covariation tends to be higher with data collected in the same source) showing that method biases can significantly influence the covariation between latent constructs. Considering the small number of individuals who (in several teams), participated in the study, it was not possible to measure the four variables with data from different individuals; rather, the different-sources procedure was used only for data collected at the same time. Moreover, the team's scores for several teams were based on data from a single team member, a procedure less than ideal. Future studies should collect data about all variables, even those measured at different moments, from different sources, and use at least two or three different individuals to measure each variable. 6.2. Implications for management In spite of the above limitations, the study suggests that the AL and team virtuousness constructs interrelate, and that both may advance team affective commitment, team potency, and team performance (Stajkovic et al., 2009). Team virtuousness may be developed if leaders take several steps (Cameron et al., 2011, Rego et al., 2010 and Cameron et al., 2011). First, leaders may allow team members to experience a sense of positive purpose in their work, with positive consequences for work engagement and performance (Bunderson & Thompson, 2009). Bill George, author of Authentic leadership (2003), and former CEO of Medtronic, observed that “we need leaders who lead with purpose, values, and integrity; leaders who build enduring organizations, motivate their employees to provide superior customer service, and create long-term value for shareholders” (p. 9). He provided a good illustration of how to develop a virtuous sense of purpose among employees: inviting patients to share their experiences with Medtronic employees, allowing them to understand how important their work is for improving peoples' lives. Second, leaders may create and sustain optimism, even when major challenges and difficulties are faced. Possible actions (Luthans et al., 2007) are (a) promoting employees' leniency for the past, (b) appreciating the present, (c) seeking opportunities for the future, and (d) maintaining realistic and flexible perspectives. Promoting realistic and flexible optimism is necessary for avoiding “Pollyanna” effects that lead teams to deal with organizational problems and opportunities without realism (Rego, Sousa, Marques, & Cunha, 2012b). Third, leaders must act in a respectful, honest, trustful, courteous, and compassionate way, cultivating their credibility, as well as trust and social capital within the team. George (2003) suggested that by “leading with heart”, leaders are more able to establish closer relationships with colleagues, thus building teams whose collective business knowledge is greater than that of the leader. Fourth, leaders should develop a strong focus on obtaining results and avoiding errors, together with a capacity to forgive (honest) errors and learn from them, encouraging psychological safety within the teams and helping the teams to be creative and improve continuously (Edmondson, 1999, Edmondson, 2008 and Mainemelis, 2010). Edmondson, 1999 and Edmondson, 2008 provided several examples of how high standards of performance may be combined with a culture of forgiveness and learning from mistakes (e.g., introducing “failure parties” to honor intelligent experiments that failed). By fostering a combination of high accountability for meeting demanding goals with high psychological safety, team leaders may help teams to develop, and work within, “learning zones”. In such teams, (a) (honest) mistakes are assumed and used for improving processes and products/services, (a) team members know that their ideas are welcome and thus feel freer to propose creative and innovative solutions, (c) people feel safe to take risks in a context of clear and disciplined procedures and (d) improvement is continuously promoted, across all areas and levels. Boosting team virtuousness may not only promote team affective commitment and team potency, but also support team members' positive affect, and engagement (Cameron et al., 2011), elevating the teams' performance. Such positive impact may emerge as the result of three kinds of effects (Cameron et al., 2011). Buffering effects mean that team virtuousness buffers the team from the negative effects of trauma or distress by enhancing resiliency, solidarity, and a sense of efficacy. Amplifying effects mean that team virtuousness facilitates team members' positive emotions and social capital. Heliotropic effects represent the inherent tendency of living systems toward positive energy and away from negative energy. Thus, virtuous teams cultivate “positive energy” among team members, and such positive energy elevates performance (Cameron et al., 2011), thus giving rise to “productive energy” teams, where high emotion and mental alertness match high activity levels, speed, and stamina (Vogel & Bruch, 2012). Indirectly, the study also suggests that (a) selecting leaders with authentic features and (b) implementing training and development actions aimed at increasing AL (Avolio and Gardner, 2005, Avolio et al., 2009 and Harvey et al., 2006) may have a positive impact on team potency and performance. Considering that virtuous climates may also have a positive impact on performance and employee well-being (Cameron et al., 2004, Rego et al., 2010 and Cameron et al., 2011), promoting AL may also produce such positive effects through the mediating role of team virtuousness. 6.3. Concluding remarks The study responds to a call by researchers who have argued that more empirical research is necessary to understand the mechanisms through which authentic leaders influence effective employees' behaviors and to expand the nomological network for AL (Avolio and Mhatre, 2012 and Gardner et al., 2011). The study also enriches the literature on team potency, considering that little is known about the factors promoting such an important variable for team performance (Gibson and Earley, 2007 and Lester et al., 2002). By showing how AL and team virtuousness may promote team potency, we also have taken an additional critical step toward helping organizations and their leaders to boost their teams' effectiveness. As Cameron et al. (2004, p. 794) recommended, investigation of virtuousness in organizations represents an important opportunity in the fields related to the “highest human potential, ennobling qualities, and transcendent purposes”. However, concepts like authenticity and virtuousness have been underconsidered and undervalued, in academia and among practitioners. Although scholars themselves start putting such topics in the limelight, running the risk of being “accused” of naïveté, more empirical research is necessary for legitimizing them, in both the scholarly and practitioner communities (Cameron & Winn, 2012). Without empirically demonstrated “pragmatic outcomes” (Cameron et al., 2004, p. 770) AL and virtuousness are less likely to capture attention in both communities. Considering that team affective commitment and team potency promote team performance, our study suggests that acting authentically and fostering team virtuousness, leaders are more able to promote pragmatic outcomes, in which team potency (a kind of “soft criterion” of performance; Yammarino, Dionne, Schriesheim, & Dansereau, 2008) is such an outcome. This study contributes to the team leadership and POS literatures (Cameron & Spreitzer, 2012). We do not suggest that the negative side of organizational life should be understudied and, in consonance with the POS movement, we acknowledge that the positive may produce the negative (e.g., Bunderson & Thompson, 2009), and that the negative may produce “some of the greatest triumphs, most noble virtues, and highest achievements” (Cameron et al., 2011, p. 289; see also Seligman, 2011). Rather, we agree with Cameron et al. (2011, p. 289) who argue that “[c]ognitively, emotionally, behaviorally, physiologically, and socially, evidence suggests that human systems naturally prefer exposure to the positive, so it is expected that organizational performance would be enhanced by positive practices.” Potent teams may be a critical path leading toward organizational positivity.