Exploring The Mediating And Moderating Processes Between Paternalistic Leadership And Employees’ Innovative Behaviors In Small-medium Enterprises

With the rapid development of small-medium enterprises(SMEs), there are many problems and difficulties in the development of SMEs, which makes the development of SMEs lack the core competitiveness. In the increasingly fierce competition, more and more SMEs begin to realize that employees’ innovation has gradually become more important for many enterprises to acquire the core competence. Leadership is the core of an organization, based on the paternalistic leadership, this thesis studies the intermediary and control mechanism of the paternalistic leadership on employees’ innovative behaviors. Based in literature review, according to the three dimensions of paternalistic leadership- benevolent leadership, moral leadership and authoritarian leadership, this thesis studies the intermediary and control mechanism of the paternalistic leadership on employees’ innovative behaviors respectively from the emotional path, psychological path and cognitive path. For benevolent leadership, this thesis examines positive affection’s mediating effect, power distance as control variable; for moral leadership, this thesis examines creative self-efficacy’s mediating effect, power distance as control variable; for authoritarian leadership, this thesis examines job engagement’s mediating effect, leadership learning orientation as control variable.The main conclusions of this thesis include:(1) Benevolent leadership can positively promote the employees’ innovative behaviors through positive affection.(2) Moral leadership has positive effect on employee creative behavior through creative self-efficacy.(3) Authoritarian leadership has a negative effect on employees’ innovative behaviors through job engagement.(4) Power distance can moderate the relationship between moral leadership and creative self-efficacy, as power distance lower, the relationship between moral leadership and creative self-efficacy becomes more positive.(5) Leadership learning orientation can moderate the relationship between the authoritarian leadership and job engagement, leadership learning orientation can weaken the negative impact on job engagement from authoritarian leadership.