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PurposeThis paper aims to extend the literature on how to harness the expertise of team members. This paper suggests that the leader’s expertise recognition plays an important role in enhancing team effectiveness. In addition, leader’s personal dispositions shape how the leader’s recognition could benefit team expertise utilization.Design/methodology/approachThis paper utilizes a two-wave, multi-source (team leaders and team members rated) survey design from 78 information technology teams to test the proposed moderated mediation model.FindingsThe data analysis revealed that a leader’s expertise recognition is positively related to team expertise utilization. Moreover, the leaders’ traits (i.e. social dominance and reflectiveness) act as important boundary conditions of this relationship. Specifically, only when the leader is less socially dominant or more reflective can they fully utilize the expertise recognition and enhance team creativity through team expertise utilization.Originality/valueThis study investigated an important issue that expertise utilization research has hitherto overlooked: the effects of leader’s expertise recognition on team expertise utilization and team creativity.

Improvisational behavior is an individual’s spontaneous and creative behavior in the face of emergencies, using existing material and emotional resources to respond quickly and effectively to uncertain situations. Despite increasing interest in this behavior, its antecedents remain unclear, with particular ambiguity regarding the relationship between empowering leadership and employee improvisational behavior. The present article addresses this ambiguity with the theory of reasoned action to examine whether the impact of empowering leadership on employees’ improvisational behavior is determined by employees’ attitudes toward such behavior. In this study, a multi-source design was adopted, and data (339 valid samples) were collected from five Internet companies in China’s Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces. Hierarchical regression and bootstrapping methods were used to test the hypotheses. The results reveal that (1) employees’ promotion focus moderates the relationship between empowering leadership and improvisational behavior and (2) employees’ willingness to take risks mediates the moderating effect of promotion focus. Our findings demonstrate employees’ attitudinal utility in explaining when improvisational behavior is most likely to occur under empowering leadership.