An Emprical Study Of Participative Leadership's Effects On R&D Team Member Creativity

With the development of information technology and the globalization of markets,the world now has become a world featured with high level of knowledge economy,and the Chinese companies have confronted unprecedented challenges.Therefore,the Chinese traditional “paternalistic leadership” cannot meet the needs of the Chinese firms.Participative leadership is a new type of leadership,which has been a popular management topic in recent years.Research shows that participatory management can effectively improve employee creativity,but the transmitting mechanisms of participative leadership on employee creativity still cannot be clearly answered.The objective of this study is to extend examination of participative leadership through a largely ignored perspective.Drawing on The Social Exchange Theory and The Componential Theory,this study generated propositions concerning the relations of participative leadership with employee creativity,sequentially mediated by psychological safety and creative process engagement.This result of the study is to provide theoretic and practical implications for leaders in Chinese firms to apply participative leadership to improve employee creativity.This study follows the research methods of literature analysis and questionnaire survey.Firstly,the study reviews the recent research on participative leadership,psychological safety,creative process engagement and creativity.Secondly,this study analyzes the definition of those variables and conclude their dimensions,and reveal the relationship among participative leadership,psychological safety,creative process engagement and creativity to establish the concept model and represent several research hypotheses.Thirdly,this study designs a constructed questionnaire about those variables and has conducted dyadic survey on 526 supervisor-subordinate dyads of five enterprises in southwest China.Finally,This study analyzes the data of the survey with SPSS 20.0 and MPLUS7.0,applying regression analysis,correlation analysis,reliability analysis,availbility analysis and structural equation modelling in the study.Analyses of multisource and lagged data indicated that participative leadership was positively related to employee creativity.The results also showed that psychological safety mediated the relations of participative leadership with creative process engagement.The results further indicated that the relationships of psychological safety with creativity were mediated by creative process engagement.Finally,our findings demonstrated psychological safety and creative process engagement sequentially mediated the relationship of participative leadership with creativity.The present study provides an understanding of the mechanism through which participative leadership affects employee creativity by social exchange theory and creative composition theory perspectives.Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.