How and when do employees energize their team members? The role of team boosting behaviors

We use emotional contagion and social resources theories to hypothesize that individual team members may use mood-enhancing, energizing, and uniting behaviors (i.e., team boosting behaviors) to boost team-level work engagement and performance. We further build on complementary- and supplementary-fit perspectives to hypothesize that environments that are open to fun and distractions will either hamper or bolster the beneficial role of team boosting behaviors. A total of 246 employees from 61 teams (team-level response rate=56%) reported team boosting behaviors, work engagement, and the moderators; 68 team leaders rated team performance. Results suggest that team work engagement mediated the relationship between teams’ pooled team boosting behaviors and team performance. This finding supports emotional contagion and social resources theories, and indicates that individual behavior is important for the affective-motivational states and functioning of the team as a whole. In addition, supporting a supplementary-fit perspective, the positive indirect association of team boosting behaviors with performance through team work engagement was strongest in teams high (vs. low) in fun-orientation or high (vs. low) openness to distractions. We discuss the pivotal role mood-enhancing, energizing, and uniting behaviors may play in boosting the team’s emergent states, collective effort, and team performance.