Purpose: This paper investigated the effects of issue leadership on employees' work performance. It also explored the mediating role of job challenge in the above relationship. We also tested the moderating effect of psychological ownership in the relationship between issue leadership and job challenge. Finally, this paper examined the moderated mediation effect of psychological ownership in the course of affecting issue leadership on work performance via job challenge.Methods: This paper used a cross-sectional design with questionnaires administered to 390 employees working in Korean firms. It applied an hierarchical and multi-regression analysis by using SPSS 22.0 and Hayes' Macro Process to test the proposed hypotheses including a moderated mediation model.Results: As a result of the analysis, first, it was found that the issue leadership had a positive effect on the work performance. Second, it was also found that issue leadership had a positive effect on the job challenge. In addition, job challenge was found to positive mediating effect in the relationship between issue leadership and work performance. Third, we found that the psychological ownership positively moderated the relationship between issue leadership and job challenge. Finally, the moderated mediating effect was found by confirming that the higher the degree of psychological ownership, the stronger the effect of issue leadership on the work performance via job challenge.Conclusion: This paper contributes to the leadership and work performance studies by identifying the role of issue leadership enhancing employee work performance while confirming connection mechanism and boundary conditions strengthening the positive effect of issue leadership on employee work performance.
Choi et al. (Sun,) studied this question.