Motivating employees is a perpetual goal for leaders. While leaders can work to inspire their teams in the hope of improving their effectiveness, there may be other factors getting in the way, such as poor relations among team members. Researchers have tended to look at one or the other outcome, rather than considering how motivating and demotivating factors interact.

Jiing-Lih Farh of HKUST and a team from the University of Maryland therefore conducted two studies to fill this gap and also consider if cross-cultural influences affected employee motivation.

They approached the problem by focusing on empowering leadership, which is the extent to which leaders enhance their teams' autonomy, control, self-management and confidence, and on relationship conflict, such as tension, annoyance and animosity among team members.

Combined with this was the motivational states of individual team members, in particular "psychological empowerment" - the extent to which individuals felt they had autonomy and competence to perform meaningful tasks - and "affective commitment", the extent to which they felt an attachment to and identified with their team or organization.

"Our aim was to understand how and why team-level stimuli motivate members to contribute meaningfully to their teams, as reflected by higher levels of members' innovative and teamwork behaviors and lower levels of turnover intentions," the authors say.

Their two studies were conducted in different settings - one in a classroom and the other in the real world - but both studies had participants in both the US and mainland China.

The classroom experiment involved undergraduate students who were told they were part of a critical student-level task force. They were given emails from their team leaders and two other members of the team, which were manipulated to reflect different levels of empowering leadership and relationship conflict.

As predicted by the authors, empowering leadership had a more positive effect when relationship conflict was low. When this was mediated by an individual's psychological empowerment and affective commitment, it had a notable impact on their innovative behavior, teamwork behavior and turnover intention.

In the second study, the results were rather more mixed. This study involved 105 leaders who were enrolled in EMBA courses in the US and China, and 386 of their followers. While the majority of the results were similar to the classroom study, relationship conflict did not relate significantly to psychological empowerment, although it did influence affective commitment.

The study also found the level of an individual's psychological empowerment was linked to innovative behavior but not teamwork, and affective commitment was linked to teamwork and not innovative behavior.

"Our findings suggest it is possible that empowering leadership and relationship conflict relate to individual outcomes through somewhat different motivational mechanisms, at least in some settings," the authors say.

"While empowering leadership may relate to individual outcomes through both psychological empowerment and affective commitment, it is possible that relationship conflict is more likely to relate to outcomes through affective commitment than through psychological empowerment".

"This is consistent with other research findings that relationship conflict is likely to exert stronger, more direct effects on more affective-based outcomes, such as liking other group members and affective commitment."

Interestingly, the cross-cultural effects were not significant, with results similar in both the US and China.

The authors suggest two practical implications from their findings. One is that managers need to understand the personal dynamics of their teams and take steps to mitigate the effects of relationship conflict by developing cohesive, supportive units. The other is that interventions to motivate teams may generalize across culturally-distinct societies, although managers should be aware that some individuals may embrace (or reject) their efforts more than others.