Give a Man a Fish or Teach a Man to Fish: A Cross-Level Moderated Mediation Model of Cognitive and Performance Responses of Team Members to Help of Team Leaders

Drawing upon theoretical lenses of social cognitive theory, this study explores whether, when, why, and how the helping behaviors of team leaders influence individual work role performance of team members (in terms of individual task proficiency, task adaptivity, and task proactivity) through self-efficacy of team members. The consequences of different types of help of leaders are uncovered in this study. By proposing a cross-level moderated mediation model and using multisource and multistage data from 303 team members in 39 work teams, autonomy-oriented help of leaders was found to have a differential effect on individual work role performance of members via the self-efficacy of the latter when controlling for dependency-oriented help of leaders. Moreover, the multilevel analysis of moderation uncovered that leader–member exchange relationship at the team level engendered a boundary condition for the mediating role of member self-efficacy in the relationship between autonomy-oriented help of leaders and individual work role performance of members in this model.