Empowering leadership and team improvisation: A team-level study through the lens of AMO theory

To ensure the survival of enterprises in a changing environment, the team, as the key unit of the organization, needs to spontaneously and creatively use available resources to address emerging challenges, which is known as team improvisation. How to maximize the activation of team improvisation as an exploratory process that warrants further academic investigation. This paper posits that empowering leadership is a key factor in unlocking team improvisation. Through Ability-Motivation-Opportunity (AMO) theory, the mediating role of Team efficacy (A), team identification (M), and teamwork autonomy (O), as well as the moderating effect of error aversion culture, was validated.

Drawing on a sample of 78 teams comprising 330 employees, this study conducted team-level analyses using Mplus 8.3, SPSS 22.0, and STATA 16.0 SE.

Team-level analyses demonstrate that empowering leadership significantly facilitates team improvisation. This influence is transmitted via three key pathways: team efficacy, team identification, and teamwork autonomy, each reflecting the mechanisms of ability, motivation, and opportunity, respectively. Furthermore, error aversion culture has a negative moderating effect on the path of both team identification and teamwork autonomy.

This study explains the mechanisms that facilitate team improvisation via AMO theory, thereby enriching the theoretical perspectives within the field of team improvisation research. Considering the influence of cultural differences between East and West on employee behavior, as well as the characteristics of improvisational behavior, this study introduces the widely observed culture of social context error aversion culture in Chinese organizations as a moderating variable. By doing so, it enriches the contingency factors affecting the impact of empowering leadership on team improvisation.