An Empirical Research On The Relationship Of Paradoxical Leader Behavior On Employee Creativity From The Perspective Of Motivaiton

Enterprise development is inseparable from employee creativity.In today's rapidly changing environment,companies must constantly develop innovation to gain a foothold,and employee creativity plays a key role in improving organizational performance and helping organizations survive and thrive.More and more companies are beginning to realize the need to improve employee creativity.But employee creativity is a complex concept that is influenced by factors related to individual skills,creativity-related skills,work motivation,and the environment.A large number of empirical studies have shown that leaders play an important role in cultivating,encouraging and supporting creativity.Recent studies have pointed out that a single leadership behavior has been difficult to meet the diverse needs of organizations and their members.As a result,people are gradually paying attention to multiple leadership styles.In today's society,the living environment faced by organizations is increasingly complex.There are a series of contradictions and conflicts in the internal management of organization,such as flexibility and control,command and authorization,exploration and stability.Leaders inevitably need to face and deal with many “different” demands.Traditional leadership styles often follow the logic of “one or the other”,such as emphasizing giving employees more autonomy,but neglecting unified control,which may cause problems such as deviation of goals.Researchers are calling on leaders to use “both/and”integrated thinking to manage to meet the diverse needs of organizations and their members.As a new way of leadership,paradoxical leader behavior use contradictions and integrated thinking to balance and coordinate environmental changes,employees,teams and organizations.The influence has gradually attracted the attention of the academic community.Therefore,it is necessary to deeply study the impact of public opinion leadership behavior on employee behavior,and use the positive role of paradoxical leader behavior to better stimulate the subordinates' positive work behavior.Existing research on leadership style and creativity focuses on a single leadership behavior and has a divergence in the impact of employee creativity:on the one hand,some “top-down” leadership behavior is conducive to employee creativity.For example,the empowerment and inclusion of empowered leadership,shared leadership,and benevolent leadership can have a positive impact on employee creativity.On the other hand,some studies have pointed out that the leader's laissezfaire and benevolent behavior may cause negative consequences such as subordinate social rule violations.Paradoxical leader behavior has its own “both/and” characteristics that have a complex impact on creativity.Therefore,this study attempts to explore how and when paradoxical leader behavior affects employee creativity.This study builds a model of the impact of paradoxical leader behavior on employee creativity.First,based on literature analysis,the core variables involved in the study are defined,including paradoxical leader behavior,employee creativity,creativity self-efficacy,intrinsic motivation,relational energy,job engagement and uncertainty avoidance.The active motivation model,self-determination theory and social cognitive theory is expounded.Second,based on the above theory,this study proposes a series of research hypotheses:the direct effect of paradoxical leader behavior on employee creativity;constructing a chained multi-intermediary model to reveal the internal mechanism of paradoxical leader behavior affecting employee creativity;The moderated mediation model is proposed to examines the boundary conditions for the effectiveness of paradoxical leader behavior.In this study,342 employees and their leaders from China are selected as samples for analysis.The model were empirically tested and analyzed by hierarchical regression analysis.The results show that:(1)paradoxical leader behavior positively and significantly affects employee creativity.(2)Creativity self-efficacy,intrinsic motivation and relational energy play mediating roles between paradoxical leader behavior and employee creativity.Specifically,paradoxical leader behavior enhances employee creativity through creativity self-efficacy,intrinsic motivation and relational energy.(3)Paradoxical leader behavior through“creative self-efficacy-job engagement”,“intrinsic motivation-job engagement”and “relational energy-job engagement” three paths to enhance employee creativity.(4)Uncertainty avoidance plays a moderating role in mediationbetween paradoxical leader behavior and creativity self-efficacy.Uncertainty avoidance plays a moderating role in mediation between paradoxical leader behavior and intrinsic motivation.However,uncertainty avoidance can not play moderating role between paradoxical leader behavior and relational energy and the moderated mediation is not supported.This study discusses the management implications.Leaders can cultivate organizational dialectical thinking and integrate thinking,gain insight into organizational complexity and correctly handle leadership relationships to stimulate leadership effectiveness.Leaders should adopt a series of inspiring incentives to help employees improve their creativity;leaders can adopt differentiated guidance strategies for employees with different levels of uncertainty avoidance to improve employee creativity and ensure the organization works well.