Influencing Factors And Mechanism Of Leadership Style On Organizational Innovation

Innovation is important for any kinds of organization which want to lead in the market, and achieve the success in recent decades. Research into innovation has grown theoretically and methodologically sophisticated, and has made important contributions to direct practices. However, most current empirical research has explored their relationships in isolation. If strides are to be made in management, we must arrive at a far more detailed understanding of the mechanism of creative process. The basic assumptions of this thesis are that organizational innovation will be increased under the appropriate factors, which are important for any organization which want increase their ability. Therefore, this research is significant to both academics and practitioners. For academics, this research provides an integrative research framework for studying organizational innovation influencing factors and integrative empirical research models.This thesis consist three important studies, exploring the important influencing factors on innovation outcomes. In study I,12years of research into innovation field was systematically analyzed to identify these factors, which was based on a content analysis about the lead journals. They are, Academy of Management Journal (AMJ), Administrative Science Quarterly (ASQ), Journal of Applied Psychology (JAP), Journal of Organizational Behavior (JOB), Organization Science (OS), Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (OBHDP), Journal of Creative Behavior (JCB), Creativity Research Journal (CRJ). At the end of our analysis we identified652articles and wanted to identify new potential factors for study in further. Our result of this first study indicated that:1) personality, motivation and cognition ability were the main influencing factors at the individual level;2) structure, climate, leadership and task characteristics were the group level factors;3) structure, culture, strategy and resources were the influencing factors at organizational level. Study II, based on study I, surveyed109employees in Chinese industrial companies to study the relationship among transformational, transactional leadership and organizational innovations, furthers more, the moderating role of organizational empowerment culture. And both of leadership was independent variables and organizational innovation was dependent variables. The main findings indicated that both transformational, transactional leadership have direct positive effect on organizational innovation, while organizational empowerment culture was not significant, except its moderating effect on transformational leadership dimension namely idealized influence. Study III, based also on the result of the study I, surveyed168employees in Chinese industrial companies, this study indicated a new mechanism and framework between transformational leadership and organizational innovation, in this study transformational leadership was an independent variable and organizational innovation was a dependent variable, furthermore this study explored the relationship under mediating role of motivation, creative self-efficacy and under the moderating role of organizational based self-esteem, and also explored the mediating role of creativity between the above three factors and organizational innovation. The result indicated that motivation, creative self-efficacy mediate the relationship positively under its effects on creativity. In addition we found that organizational based self-esteem positively effects organizational innovation under its moderating effect on creativity.This research clarified the influencing mechanism of leadership styles on organizational innovation. Moreover, this thesis also contributes to the understanding under which conditions leadership styles play an important role in achieving organizational innovation success. This research found evidence for the theory that leadership behavior is benefit for the organizational innovation success, when a manager with a transformational leadership style. This research may be used as a stepping stone for further empirical research on organizational innovation and its related factors.