When differentiated empowering leadership improves team identification and individual work engagement: the combined roles of performance basis, team-member exchange, and employee self-efficacy

The extant research has primarily investigated the negative effect of differentiated empowering leadership (DEL) on either the individual or team-level outcomes, revealing little about the positive influence of DEL and rarely considering the dual-level effects. According to the legitimacy perspective, the performance basis is identified as a crucial factor in enabling DEL to confer benefits to the entire team and individual members simultaneously. Furthermore, the boundary effects of team-member exchange (TMX) and employee self-efficacy on the moderating process were examined. The cross-hierarchy and hierarchical regression methods were employed to analyze the multisource data from 78 Chinese teams. The findings revealed that (1) for the effect on the whole team, DEL was positively related to team identification when highly based on employee job performance, and the effect was stronger in the team with higher-quality team-member exchange; (2) for the effect on individual members, the relation between performance-based DEL and employee work engagement was positive for the high self-efficacy members but negative for the low self-efficacy members. These findings underscore the importance of DEL basis, team, and individual contexts for a comprehensive understanding of the impact of DEL.