Linking employee boundary spanning behavior to task performance: the influence of informal leader emergence and group power distance
研究了中国新产品开发团队中，员工边界跨越行为如何通过非正式领导涌现影响任务绩效，并发现团队权力距离会调节这一过程。
Driven by fierce global competition, flatter organizational structures and the growing complexity of tasks, boundary spanning behavior (BSB) in externally dependent work teams has increasingly been emphasized in both theory and practice. The current study aims to answer the questions of whether, when and how an individual’s BSB impacts his or her task performance within a team. Based on a sample of 272 employees from 57 new product development teams in China, we found that informal leader emergence mediated the relationship between an individual’s BSB and his or her performance within a team. Moreover, group-level power distance positively moderated the association between BSB and informal leader emergence. An overall mediated moderation model of the effect of the interaction between BSB and group power distance (PD) on task performance via informal leadership emergence was also confirmed. In particular, the relationship between BSB and task performance via informal leadership emergence was stronger for teams with less PD than for those with more PD. The implications of the research are discussed.