How and when differentiated transformational leadership influences employees' taking charge? The roles of psychological availability and collectivism orientation

Purpose Based on the conservation of resource theory, this paper explores the impact of differentiated transformational leadership on employees' taking charge in the context of Chinese organizations, with psychological availability as a mediator and collectivism orientation as a moderator. Design/methodology/approach The authors distributed paired questionnaires to 67 team managers and 219 team members to obtain research data and established a hierarchical linear model for the hypothesis testing. Findings The results show that team-focus transformational leadership has a significant positive impact on employees' taking charge, and individual-focus transformational leadership has a significant negative impact on employees' taking charge. Specifically, psychological availability plays a partial mediating role between differentiated transformational leadership and employees' taking charge. Moreover, collectivism orientation has no significant moderating effect between team-focus transformational leadership and psychological availability. But it has a significant moderating effect between individual-focus transformational leadership and psychological availability, i.e. the higher the level of collectivism orientation, the stronger the negative effect of individual-focus transformational leadership on psychological availability. Originality/value The paper notes the hierarchy of differentiated transformational leadership and divides it into team-focus transformational leadership and individual-focus transformational leadership. It also provides a new mechanism and boundary condition, i.e. differentiated transformational leadership has an impact on employees' taking charge through psychological availability and collectivism orientation is a moderator.