The Influence Of Paternalistic Leadership On Proactive Behavior:Examining The Effect Of Psychological Ownership And Traditionality

As the organizational environment become more complicated and dynamic, the organizational development and progress increasingly depend on the proactive behavior of employees. It is described as self-starting, change-oriented and future-oriented behavior, such as adapting to changing conditions and proactively coping new challenges, that aims to challenge the status quo rather than passively adapting to present surroundings. Proactive employees are said to exhibit the necessary innovativeness, future orientation and self-motivation required to add real value to organizations facing these difficult challenges, and it is necessary for enterprises to recognize the styles of leadership that can strengthen employee proactive behavior. Based on relevant literatures, though the studies on the leadership styles, such as transformational leadership and empowering leadership, which influence proactive behavior, are very rich, but some important leadership factors have been ignored, such as the paternalistic leadership in China’s local culture, and the interpretations of the happening mechanism are still not comprehensive. Therefore, explore the impact of paternalistic leadership on employee proactive behavior and identify the mediating and moderating mechanisms in converting the paternalistic leadership to proactive behaviors in China have theoretical and practical significance.Based on the social exchange theory, the study explores the paternalistic leadership on employee proactive behavior. Moreover, the mediating effect of psychological ownership and the relationship between moral leadership and proactive behavior; the relationship between psychological ownership and proactive behavior was positively moderated by traditionality, such that the relationship between psychological ownership and proactive behavior is stronger when traditionality is higher; authoritarian leadership is not related to psychological ownership and proactive behavior.The innovations of this paper are as following:first, the research confirms that the paternalistic leadership have the effect on subordinate’s proactive behavior, supplements the studies on the relationship between the paternalistic leadership and employee proactive behavior under the Chinese cultural background; second, the research confirms that psychological ownership have the effect on subordinate’s proactive behavior, enriches the previous studies of independent variables about proactive behavior; third, the research also find that the Chinese traditional characteristic can moderate the relationship between psychological ownership and proactive behavior in Chinese culture context, broadens the research of moderating mechanisms and provides some references for studies on the cross-cultural management.