Distributed Leadership Agency and Work Outcomes: Validation of the Italian DLA and Its Relations With Commitment, Trust, and Satisfaction

Abstract

Forms of collective leadership, such as distributed leadership, have become increasingly important. The need for measurement of the variables involved in the delegation processes represents a new challenge for organizations that want to ensure highlevel working. The present study aimed to validate the Italian version of the distributed leadership agency (DLA). The study was carried out on 704 employees (doctors, nurses, clerks, staff workers, healthcare assistants, consultants, management) of an Italian public hospital, who were selected to complete a survey on organizational perceptions. Multiple confirmatory factor analyses (maximum likelihood) have been computed to explore the factorial structure of the DLA, along with associations with other work outcomes. Results about the Italian DLA confirmed the original trifactorial structure of the construct, suggested by Yukl (2002), through good fit indexes and reliability scores; moreover, consistent with the literature, DLA was strongly related to satisfaction, commitment, and trust. Results contribute to underline the robustness of the construct of DLA in different cultural sectors and provide a useful tool to be adopted in the Italian context.

Ethical Climate(s), Distributed Leadership, and Work Outcomes: The Mediating Role of Organizational Identification

“…Overall, our results are in line with previous studies that show that employee’s perceptions of supportive organizational climates and practices (characterized by ethics and responsibility, the sharing of values, the attention to the health and safety of workers, and morality) have effects on important work outcomes through OI. Moreover, in line with these results, this study shows that perceptions regarding empowerment and delegation (conceptualized as DLA) have a significant positive relation with an ethical climate of friendship, a significant negative relation with a self-interest ethical climate, and a significant positive effect on OI ( Unterrainer et al, 2017 ; Barattucci et al, 2020 ). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study suggesting that DLA has a positive impact on work outcomes through OI, thus opening up new possible theoretical debates and directions.…”

“…Distributed leadership agency was assessed with the Italian version ( Barattucci et al, 2020 ) of the DLA scale ( Jønsson et al, 2016 ), in order to evaluate active participation in leadership tasks (α = 0.96). The scale was composed of 11 items, on a 5-point scale (from 0, “completely false,” to 4, “completely true”).…”

“…On those premises, in the present study, we postulate the existence of a mutual interplay of delegation empowerment (perceived as a supportive initiative and based on the collective contribution) and perceptions regarding the organizational ethical identity. Furthermore, we find reasonable the assumption that DLA will positively relate with a friendship ethical climate and not with a self-interest ethical climate and that DLA will relate to many outcomes through OI ( Barattucci et al, 2020 ), and we hypothesized the following:…”

“…Based on the concept of DL, DLA represents the degree to which all employees individually experience being actively engaged in leadership activities, managing tasks, and communication at work ( Jønsson et al, 2016 ). Leveraging on the concept of individual as an agent ( Mayrowetz, 2008 ; Gronn, 2009 ), it denotes how much each employee, with or without formal leadership functions, is involved in leadership tasks, resulting in a positive influence on commitment, satisfaction, and perceived autonomy ( Jønsson et al, 2016 ; Unterrainer et al, 2017 ; Barattucci et al, 2020 ). This leads us to hypothesize the following:…”

How are empowering leadership, self‐efficacy and innovative behavior related to nurses' agency in distributed leadership in Denmark, Italy and Israel?

“…By implication, a well‐led unit would depend on a great deal of nurses contributing to leading the many activities necessary for a successful ward unit, including more innovative behaviour. To the individual nurse, DLA may also be important, as findings show employees with higher degrees of DLA to be more autonomous, satisfied with their jobs and committed to their organisations, than employees with less DLA (Barattucci et al., 2020; Jønsson et al., 2016; Unterrainer et al., 2017).…”