When boss puts off, the team worse off: The mitigating role of initiative-enhancing HRM systems

Abstract

The negative role of workplace procrastination is widely recognized, while much less research focuses on leader procrastination. We bring our attention to this domain and investigate the implications of leader procrastination. By drawing insights from social information processing theory and identifying team procrastination climate as a new construct, which describes the collective perceptions team members hold regarding procrastination at work, we develop a moderated-mediation model to examine how leader procrastination and initiative-enhancing human resource management (HRM) systems foster conditions to inhibit or facilitate team procrastination climate and subsequent team effectiveness, operationalized as team performance and team organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). We tested the theoretical model with two-source data collected from 550 members of 124 teams across three time periods. Results showed that leader procrastination facilitated the development of team procrastination climate that undermined team effectiveness. Further, the effects of leader procrastination were significant only under low levels of initiative-enhancing HRM systems. These results offer new insights into theoretical implications for research on procrastination at work and provide practical implications on how to counteract the development of team procrastination climate.