Experiencing meaningfulness climate in teams: How spiritual leadership enhances team effectiveness when facing uncertain tasks

• Date: 01 March 2019
• Author: Xiaoyu Huang,Lusi Wu,Fu Yang
• Published date: 01 March 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/hrm.21943

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Experiencing meaningfulness climate in teams: How spiritual

leadership enhances team effectiveness when facing uncertain

tasks

Fu Yang

1

| Xiaoyu Huang

2

| Lusi Wu

3

1

School of Business Administration,

Southwestern University of Finance and

Economics, Chengdu, China

2

College of Business and Public

Administration, California State University San

Bernardino, San Bernardino, California

3

School of Management and Economics,

University of Electronic Science and

Technology of China, Chengdu, Sichuan, China

Correspondence

Lusi Wu, University of Electronic Science and

Technology of China, School of Management

and Economics, Xiyuan Road 2006, Gaoxin

District, Chengdu, Sichuan, China.

Email: susanwu.lusi1990@gmail.com

Funding information

National Natural Science Foundation of China,

Grant/Award Number: 71502141

This study integrates social information processing theory with leadership and climate literature,

and aims to produce novel theoretical insights into whether and how spiritual leadership and

task uncertainty foster conditions to enhance meaningfulness climate and subsequent team

effectiveness in China. Team effectiveness was operationalized as team performance and team

organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). Based on data collected at three time points over

12 months from multiple sources of 123 teams in China, we found that spiritual leadership was

positively related to team performance and team OCB through meaningfulness climate. Further,

the relationship between spiritual leadership and meaningfulness climate was stronger for teams

with high task uncertainty than teams with low task uncertainty.

KEYWORDS

China, meaningfulness climate, spiritual leadership, task uncertainty, team effectiveness

1|INTRODUCTION

As people spend most of their waking hours at work, work lays the

primary foundation for identity, purpose, and belongingness

(Michaelson, Pratt, Grant, & Dunn, 2014). Meaningful work has been

identified as the most important feature that individuals seek in a job

(Cascio, 2003; Michaelson et al., 2014). When employees feel what

they are doing at work is meaningful, they tend to find their job signif-

icant, valuable, and interesting (Hackman & Oldham, 1976). By con-

trast, when employees find their work meaningless, they will think of

their job as trivial, worthless, and boring. This difference helps to

understand why some employees show high engagement at work,

whereas others are not able to be fully engaged at work. Research

demonstrates that work meaningfulness is beneficial to both

employees and organizations. For example, meaningfulness has been

associated with increased work engagement (e.g., Chen, Zhang, &

Vogel, 2011; May, Gilson, & Harter, 2004; Soane et al., 2013), job sat-

isfaction (e.g., Sparks & Schenk, 2001), well-being (e.g., Campbell,

Converse, & Rodgers, 1976), and reduced stress (e.g., Elangovan, Pin-

der, & McLean, 2010).

Despite the increasing breadth of work meaningfulness literature,

there is little research on work meaningfulness in work teams. Extant

research has largely ignored the antecedents and the outcomes of col-

lective and shared perceptions regarding work meaningfulness among

team members. However, as team becomes the fundamental unit in

job accomplishments, whether members perceive their team projects

or work as meaningful and purposeful can affect their team behaviors.

Our objective is thus to expand work meaningfulness literature by

exploring the presence and impact of shared perceptions held by team

members on work meaningfulness. We call these shared perceptions

meaningfulness climate, defined as the shared perceptions among team

members of the extent to which their work is significant, valuable, and

interesting.

Prior literature has demonstrated the importance of leaders in

shaping team climate (Dragoni, 2005). Here, we focus on spiritual

leadership and investigate its role in developing meaningfulness cli-

mate, as it enhances employees’beliefs that they are working intrinsi-

cally for the right thing (Reave, 2005). Spiritual leadership refers to

“the values, attitudes, and behaviors that one must adopt in intrinsi-

cally motivating one’s self and others so that both have a positive

increase in the sense of spiritual well-being through calling and

DOI: 10.1002/hrm.21943

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