Can Empowering Leadership Increase New Product Development Performance in China: The Destructive Role of Error Aversion Culture

Empowering leadership has been widely recognized as an effective approach to enhancing new product development performance in Western countries. However, it was not so prevalent in Chinese R&D team management. This study reported here examined the relationship between empowering leadership and new product development performance (i.e., new product creativity, and new product development speed) by focusing on the mediating effect of job autonomy, direct and moderating effects of error aversion culture to find out the reasons. Data collected from a two-wave survey involving 107 superiors and 387 subordinates in 107 R&D teams in China was used to conduct analysis of hierarchical multiple regression. The results revealed two key findings. Firstly, empowering leadership was found to have no significant association with new product development speed which was the primary performance target for Chinese R&D teams. Secondly, while empowering leadership was positively associated with new product creativity when mediated by job autonomy, the widespread presence of an error aversion culture in China significantly reduced job autonomy within R&D teams and negatively moderated the relationship between empowering leadership and job autonomy. Consequently, empowering leadership had no impact on new product creativity when error aversion culture was high. The implications of these findings were discussed in the context of Chinese R&D teams, aiming to highlight potential avenues for improving new product development performance through leadership interventions.