The Contingency Effects of Environmental Uncertainty on the Relationship between Benevolent Leadership and Team Member Attitudes

Benevolent leadership is the personal, overall, and long-term concern for the well-being of subordinates, which is traceable to the monarchy, fatherly obligations, and the Confucianist principle of reciprocity. Despite a growing body of research on the benevolent leadership, its differentiable binary concepts and corresponding effects have received scant attention. There has also been relatively little research on the effects of benevolent leadership within teams, as well as the possible moderators on such impacts. Our purpose in this study was to address these important gaps by focusing on the effects of life-oriented and work-oriented benevolent leadership on team member attitudes, considering the moderating role of environmental uncertainty. We conducted a cross-level investigation of benevolent leadership effectiveness, including of 225 full-time employees within 38 teams from organizations situated throughout Taiwan using survey research techniques. Consistent with our hypotheses, life-oriented benevolent leadership was positively related to team identification, while work-oriented benevolent leadership was positively related to team satisfaction. In addition, the effects of life-oriented benevolent leadership on both team identification and satisfaction were stronger in teams under highly uncertain environment. Overall, our study extends benevolent leadership theory by providing evidence of its two distinguished concepts and impacts in team context, and emphasized the important role of life-oriented benevolent leadership. The results also highlight the importance of broadening our conceptual models of benevolent leadership to include moderating role of external environment and of conducting additional cross-level research on team benevolent leadership.