The Empirical Research Of Mechanism On The Relationship Between Authentic Leadership And Employees' Innovative Behavior

Employee's innovative behavior is essential to corporate innovation.In the academia of management research,many scholars have tried to use quantitative research methods to discover the antecedent variables of employee innovative behavior.Many of these studies focused on those leadership behaviors or styles that stimulate employee innovation.Although there is a consensus that authentic leadership can promote employee's innovative behavior,there still lacks research about the mechanism on the relationship between authentic leadership and employee's innovative behavior as well as the constraint variables compared with other types of leadership behaviors.Under the current political and economic situation at home and abroad,firm innovation is particularly arduous.In the meanwhile,leaders showing authentic leadership are needed.They can maintain stable,authentic,and reasonable under various conditions.To study the mechanism through which authentic leadership can promote employees' innovative behavior has important theoretical and practical significance.Therefore,this research goes deep into the practice of Chinese manufacturing enterprises,exploring the mediating effect and boundary conditions of the authentic leadership's effect on employees' innovative behavior of employees.This research could fill the gap of existing research that lacks deep investigation on the mechanism of authentic leadership's relationship and innovative behavior.This research takes Chinese manufacturing companies as our sample,using mixed research methods combining both qualitative and quantitative research methods,to explore the mechanism of authentic leadership behavior on employees' innovative behavior.This research first goes deep into several typical Chinese manufacturing firms,collecting valuable first-hand qualitative information by in-depth interviews.In the qualitative research part,this research adopts the grounded theory method to analyze the original data.Through a systematic data coding process,this research found that authentic leadership influences employees' innovative behavior through the intermediate mechanisms of organizational innovation climate,employee moral identification and organizational procedural justice.This process successfully made an initial exploration of the process by which authentic leadership influences employees' innovative behavior.On this basis,as well as pre-existing research results,this research combined both the integration perspective and interactive perspective to build an integrated theoretical model analyzing the mechanism by which authentic leadership shows influence on employees' innovative behavior.Based on our theoretical model,as well as existing research,this research made detailed testable research hypotheses.Finally,through small sample pre-research and the main research,this research collect data from both leaders and subordinates through step-by-step survey using questionnaires.It verified the dimensions and measurements of authentic leadership,employees' innovation behavior,as well as other concepts.By using structural equation models and linear regression methods,as well as other related quantitative methods,this research tested the theoretical model and the hypotheses.The main findings of this research are:(1)authentic leadership can promote employees' innovative behavior.Organizational innovation climate and employees' moral identification mediate this relationship.The mediating effect of moral identification are much stronger.(2)The four sub-dimensions of authentic leadership show different main effects and mediating effects towards employees' innovation behavior.Although the main effect of self-awareness,internalized moral perspectives,balanced information processing,relationship transparency towards employees' innovative behavior are all significant,however,the relationship between selfawareness and employees' innovative behavior is the strongest,while the relationship between relationship transparency and employees' innovative behavior is the weakest.Organizational innovation climate and moral identification play partial mediating role between self-awareness,internalized moral perspectives,balanced information processing and employees' innovative behavior.Considering about the whole model with both the mediating effect of organizational innovation climate and moral identification,the direct effect between relationship transparency and employees' innovative behavior is not significant.Organization innovation climate and moral identification play a full mediation role between relational transparency and employees' innovative behavior.When considering about the different mediating effect of moral identification and organizational innovation climate,moral identification has a much stronger mediating effect compared with organizational innovation climate when mediating the relationship between all the four sub-dimensions and employees' innovative behavior.(3)Procedural justice positively moderates the relationship between authentic leadership and employees' innovative behavior.When the level of procedural justice is high,authentic leadership behavior shows positive influence towards employees' moral identification.Furthermore,there may exist moderated mediation effects between authentic leadership,procedural justice,employees' moral identification and organizational innovative behavior.To sum up,this research proposes and verifies the integration model of authentic leadership's influence on employees' innovative behavior,which not only fills the gap of lacking research about the mechanism of authentic leadership's influence on employees' innovative behavior,but also show practical implication.The research provides guidance on how to improve authentic leadership,as well as guidance on how to actively set organizational factors to promote the influence of authentic leadership.Thus,firms could find ways to influence employees' innovative behavior.That is to say,this research is with both abundant theoretical and practical implications.