Mediating role of intra-team conflict between paternalistic leadership and decision-making quality among China university's CMT during COVID-19
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
9-1-2022
Abstract
Universities across China have set up crisis management teams (CMTS) to deal with the crisis brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. This study focuses on how the paternalistic leadership practices of a Chinese university CMT influence crisis strategic decisions by managing conflict. These relationships were verified using hierarchical regression analysis on 312 samples from the surveyed university during the pandemic and found the following: benevolent leadership and moral leadership have positive effects on decision quality. However, unlike most studies on paternalistic leadership, in crisis situations, the negative effects of authoritarian leadership disappear under the mediating effect of affective conflict. This means that affective conflict within CMT fully mediates the relationship between authoritarian leadership and decision quality, and partially mediates the relationship between moral leadership and decision quality, while cognitive conflict partially mediates the relationship between benevolent leadership and crisis decision quality. It indicates that a CMT must stimulate and maintain a certain level of cognitive conflict while suppressing affective conflict to achieve high-quality crisis decision-making. This state can be achieved by practicing lower levels of authoritarian leadership and maintaining high levels of moral and benevolent leadership practices.
Keywords
Crisis Management Teams (CMTS), Paternalistic leadership, Intra-team conflict, Decision-making quality, COVID-19 crisis management
Divisions
Education
Funders
Jiangxi University Humanities and Social Science Research Project [JY21238]
Publication Title
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
Volume
19
Issue
18
Publisher
MDPI
Publisher Location
ST ALBAN-ANLAGE 66, CH-4052 BASEL, SWITZERLAND