Issue Leadership as a Mediator between Self-efficacy/Initiative Behavior and Leadership Effectiveness/Innovativeness

Most organizations has been troubled with the lack of leadership, which led to interest in the leadership competency in the field of human resource development(HRD). Especially, after the finance crisis management development programs has been paid attention into leadership competency development from traditional manager development in industrial education and training. Therefore, the present study posits and empirically tests the hypotheses that the issue leadership behavior mediates the relationships between self-efficacy and initiative behavior, and leadership effectiveness and innovativeness. The issue leadership theory proposed by Baik(2000) has been tested in many studies in terms of the impact of leaders’ issue activities on dependent variables. The results obtained so far have been quite promising in that the three facets of issue leadership(i.e., issue creating, audience involving, and issue implementing) predict leadership effectiveness with strong significance. However, the role of issue leadership as a mediator has not been fully tested yet. The current study surveyed a sample of 197 sets, each set containing three respondents of 1 team leader and 2 team members, from 32 organizations with three different questionnaires. One questionnaire measured independent variables such as self-efficacy and initiative behavior from a team leader, another the mediator, i.e., issue leadership from one team member, and the other the dependent variables as in leadership effectiveness and innovativeness from the other team member, hence avoiding the common method variance. The results of structural equations model generally confirmed the hypotheses. Implications of the present study have been discussed along with the study’s limitations and directions of HRD future research.