How is Productive Human Energy created in Teams?

Integrating ritual chain theory and the self-concept-based theory of transformational leadership, we propose a model on how transformational leadership influences productive team energy through team boundary spanning. Productive team energy is the extent to which teams have mobilized their collective cognitive, affective, and behavioral resources. The results, based on multilevel structural equation modeling of data from 121 R&D-teams, comprising 896 employees and 98 team leaders, support our model. Furthermore, our results partly indicate that the link between transformational leadership and team boundary spanning is strengthened when a team's demographic diversity is high. Our study contribute to the new emerging field of human energy in organizations by theoretically expanding this field to include interactions at the team level and providing first insights into which mechanisms create productive energy in teams.