The balancing of leadership between project managers and team members in the consulting industry: The role of empowerment and social-normative motivation to lead.

Abstract

This master thesis examines the nature of the relationship between a vertical leader’s empowerment of a team member and the empowered team member’s social-normative motivation to lead (SN-MTL) in project teams within the consulting industry. Furthermore, it investigates whether level of self-efficacy (SE) and team psychological safety (TPS) have moderating effects on the hypothesized relationship between empowerment and SN-MTL. Data was collected using a quantitative self-reporting questionnaire on N=83 respondents who worked as consultants in project teams located in Scandinavia. Multivariate regression analysis was conducted in IBM SPSS to analyze data. The results of the analyses revealed no significant relationship between empowerment and SN-MTL. Consequently, no support was found for any moderating effects from SE or TPS. However, a supplementary finding revealed a relationship between two of the subfactors of SN-MTL and SE. The thesis contributes to the existing literature on balanced leadership by emphasizing the importance of motivation to lead. Furthermore, it sheds light on a gap in the literature in terms of the relationship between motivation to lead and SE. The theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed. Key words Project management, team, project team, consulting, Balanced Leadership Theory, vertical leadership, horizontal leadership, Empowerment, Social-normative motivation to lead, MTL, SN-MTL, Self-Efficacy, Team psychological safety, TPS.