关键词: 参与型领导, 工作负荷, 组织自尊, 工作幸福感, 感知同事支持

Abstract: Faced with the rapidly changing social environment, organizations inevitably need to make decisions quickly and accurately. Traditionally, organizational decision is made by the leaders. However, more and more researchers find that it is not enough to rely solely on the ability and intelligence of leaders to make good decisions. To address this issue, organizations should encourage employees to participate in decision-making. Accordingly, the concept of participative leadership emerged and attracted a certain number of scholars’ attention. Participative leadership refers to a set of leadership behaviors that leaders inquire suggestions from their subordinates before the decision making and attempt to solve problems together with their subordinates. Leaders who have such kind of participative leadership could overcome their own shortcomings in decision-making process, and ultimately contribute to the long–term development of organizations. Traditional viewpoints posit that participative leadership recognize employees’ value and thus improve employees’ well-being in the workplace. However, some recent published research, to some extent, indicates that there may exist a potential dark side of participative leadership. For example, when the leaders provide more job autonomy for their subordinates, subordinates may suffer psychological strain. In this study, we aimed to reconcile the contradictory viewpoints mentioned above. Specifically, we draw on conservation of resource theory to propose a dual process model wherein participative leadership might have a paradoxical effect on employees’ well-being. On one hand, participative leadership evokes a sense of organization–based self–esteem, which ultimately promote subordinates’ well-being (a resource generation process). On the other hand, participative leadership increases subordinates’ workload, which in turn reduced subordinates’ well-being (a resource depletion process). Moreover, perceived co-worker support, as a kind of situational resource, could enhance the resource generation process and buffer the resource depletion process of participative leadership. To test our hypotheses, the current study conducted a 3-wave survey study. Based on 191 employees’ effective responses, the results of path analysis overall supported our arguments. Participative leadership could enhance employees’ organization-based self-esteem and subsequent well-being, while at the meantime increased employees’ workload, which in turn diminished employees’ well-being. The final effect of participative leadership on subordinates’ well-being depends on the (in)balance between the self-esteem mechanism and workload mechanism. Moreover, perceived co-worker support moderated the resource generation and depletion process of participative leadership. In particular, perceived high levels of co-worker support strengthened the beneficial indirect effect of participative leadership on subordinates’ well-being via organization-based self-esteem and decreased the detrimental indirect effect of participative leadership on subordinates’ job well-being via workload. Our findings not only advance our understanding of the relationship between participative leadership and well-being, but also provide further inspiration for managerial practice. From a theoretical implication perspective, this study is among the first to reveal the paradoxical effect of participative leadership on subordinates’ well-being, and give support for the power of conversation of resource theory in explaining the complex relationship between leadership behavior and subordinates’ well-being. Thus, our study contributes to the literature of participative leadership, subordinate well-being, and conversation of resource theory. For practitioners, our results suggest that participative leaders should assign appropriate number of jobs to their subordinates and encourage co-wokers to support each other.

Key words: participative leadership, workload, organization-based self-esteem, well-being, co-woker support