159 / 2024-04-22 11:15:26

When caring becomes a stressor: The curvilinear relationship between temporal leadership and perceived time pressure and the moderation of requirement uncertainty in R&D project teams

temporal leadership,time pressure,requirement uncertainty,R&D project team

Enterprises are facing increasingly fierce market competition, and must timely respond to market shifts to maintain their competitiveness, temporal leadership has thus gained substantial interest as it helps to coordinate teamwork pace and resolve temporal conflict. However, the practice of temporal leadership is embedded in specific scenarios, it is still unclear how temporal leadership will function in R&D projects where project teams encounter great requirement uncertainty that needs both process coordination and resource support. Building on temporal leadership literature and the job demand-resource (JD-R) model, we propose that temporal leadership has a curvilinear (i.e., inverted U-shaped) relationship with team member’s perceived time pressure. Moreover, requirement uncertainty (i.e., requirement instability and requirement unanalyzability, respectively) moderates this relationship, and perceived time pressure further negatively affects team performance. Results of multisource data from 63 research and development teams show that temporal leadership has an inverted U-shaped relationship with perceived time pressure, and requirement uncertainty moderates such relationship that the curvilinear relationship is stronger with high (vs. low) levels of requirement uncertainty, perceived time pressure negative affects team performance. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.