Antecedents of Motivation to Lead: Goal Orientation and Team Individualism

Abstract

Recently, a social trend termed “leadership phobia”, which refers to a phenomenon characterized by avoiding leadership roles, has received coverage in South Korea. This trend, indicating a decreased motivation to lead, calls for further studies on the antecedents of motivation to lead. Therefore, the primary purpose of this study is to identify individual- and team-level factors that influence motivation to lead and test their main effects as well as interaction effects. Specifically, we focus on individual goal orientation and team individualism. In this context, we distinguish between three different types of goal orientation: learning goal orientation, performance prove goal orientation, and performance avoid goal orientation. We conducted a paper-and-pencil survey among 222 team members from 43 teams in a large company in South Korea and employed hierarchical linear modeling to test our hypotheses. Our findings revealed that both learning goal orientation and performance prove goal orientation positively influenced motivation to lead. Conversely, performance avoid goal orientation exhibited a negative association with motivation to lead. Interestingly, contrary to our initial prediction, team individualism did not demonstrate any significant main effect on motivation to lead. Among the cross-level interaction effects between the three types of goal orientation and team individualism, we found that the interaction between performance prove goal orientation and team individualism was statistically significant, aligning with our expectations. Specifically, for team members with a high level of performance prove goal orientation, team individualism had a detrimental effect on motivation to lead. Conversely, for team members with a low level of performance prove goal orientation, team individualism had a positive effect on motivation to lead. However, our hypothesis suggesting that learning goal orientation would amplify the negative impact of team individualism on motivation to lead was not supported. Surprisingly, learning goal orientation weakened the negative effect instead. On the other hand, the interaction between performance avoid goal orientation and team individualism did not yield any significant findings. These results have important theoretical and practical implications, which are discussed further in this study.