Meaning-based leadership, empowering leadership, and team strategy implementation

The concept of meaning-based leadership, leader advocacy of the meaning organizational purpose gives to the work, was proposed to capture the core role of leadership in organizations: motivating pursuits in the service of the organization's purpose. We study the influence of meaning-based leadership on one such pursuit – strategy implementation. We argue that team leaders may motivate team strategy implementation efforts through meaning-based leadership, because of this leadership's influence on team alignment around organizational values. We propose that this influence is contingent on team leader empowering leadership, such that meaning-based leadership has a stronger influence on team value alignment, and thus indirectly on team strategy implementation, with higher empowering leadership. This research model was supported in a multi-source survey of teams in an insurance company.