Due to the uncertainty and complexity of internal and external environment,employees are encouraged to show more informal leadership in the organization,although leadership emergence is not an essential part of their formal job requirements.At present,companies are increasingly implementing distributed leadership to boost employees to emerge as informal leaders.However,existing studies have found that the relationships between distributed leadership and individual leadership emergence are inconsistent,owing to ignoring the influence of situational factors on the relationship above.Drawing on the situated identity theory,this paper tested the hypotheses using a multi-method approach,i.e.,the scenario-based experiment and the field survey.In the experiment,a 2*2(distributed leadership:high vs.low;collectivism:high vs.low)between-subjects were designed,and data from 232 full-time working professionals were recruited.In the field survey,data from the Yangtze River Delta Industrial Park were collected.The final sample consisted of 502 employees matched with their 84 immediate supervisors.Results showed that collectivism positively moderates the relationship between distributed leadership and leadership emergence.In addition,the mediated moderation analysis showed that felt obligation for constructive change significantly mediated the moderating effect of collectivism on the relationship between distributed leadership and leadership emergence.This paper offers several important theoretical contributions to the literature.To start with,shifting to the situational factors,this study advances the knowledge of the controversy about the association between distributed leadership and individual leadership emergence.In addition,this study reveals the boundary condition of employees'leadership emergence by investigating the moderating effect of felt obligation for constructive change,thus offering a comprehensive view of the leadership emerging process.Moreover,this paper introduces felt obligation for constructive change as a new mechanism for explaining the moderating effects of collectivism on the emerging process.By doing so,this paper addresses the knowledge gap arising from the'mechanism black box'and presents a new relational view of leadership emergence.Finally,drawing on the situated identity theory,this research contributes to a more thorough understanding of the interaction between leadership emergence and situational factors,addressing calls to explore how contextual factors influence informal leadership emergence.This paper has principal implications for organizations and managers.First of all,the results inspire managers about the importance of cultivating collectivism.Considering the collectivism values are dynamic and malleable,managers could implement different means to instill collectivist orientations among employees,such as sponsoring group-based rewards,initiating team-based collaborations,and structuring interdependent tasks.Then,the results also indicate the influence of employees'felt obligation for constructive change.As a consequence,managers ought to enhance employees'sense of responsibility and appropriately authorize them to increase their work autonomy.Furthermore,managers typically seek to stimulate employees'leadership emergence by implementing distributed leadership,such as designing challenging and complex tasks and developing supportive feedback and evaluation systems.The current research suggests that these practices run the risk of enhancing distributed leadership without cultivating the collectivism and felt obligation for constructive change,that is,pay more attention to facilitate the employees'leadership emergence in the cultural context.
distributed leadershipinformal leadership emergencecollectivismfelt obligation for constructive change
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