An Empirical Study On Impact Of Differential Leadership To Employees' Innovative Behavior

With the coming of the age of knowledge-driven economy,innovation has become the source and power to support the survival and development of enterprise,and the innovation of enterprise depends on employees' innovative behavior.So how to promote employees' innovative behavior has attracted extensive attention of academia and industry at home and abroad,which has achieved abundant research results about it.But compared with the foreign research results,the empirical study about the influence of leadership style on employees' innovative behavior under Chinese cultural background is scarce.Under the realistic situation of China and the relevant theories,this research bases on the theories about social exchange,organizational support,trust theory,and personality traits,centers on differential leadership,employees' innovative behavior,perceived organizational support,Chinese traditionality,and organizational trust,proposes related hypotheses.This research adopts the method of questionnaire survey,with a sample of 534 employees,discusses the mechanism of the differential leadership-perceived organizational support-employees' innovative behavior,and analyzes the regulation effect of the Chinese traditionality and organizational trust,and puts forward some counter-measures.The main conclusions of this research are as following:Firstly,differential leadership has a positive effect on employees' innovative behavior.According to the standard of ―consanguinity,loyalty and ability‖,leader divides the employees into insiders and outsiders and treats them differently.Both the different ways in which leader treats insiders and outsiders and the dynamic classification model have promoted employees' innovation behavior.Secondly,perceived organizational support plays a mediating role between differential leadership and employees' innovative behavior.Based on organization to humanity thought and social exchange theory,employees will regard leader's support as organizational support.Leader's reasonable preference to employees will enhance the sense of employees' perceived organizational support,and in order to return to organization or to change their situation,employees will be more motivated to take on the role of innovation and other extra-role behavior.Thirdly,Chinese traditionality and organizational trust play a positive moderating role between differential leadership and perceived organizational support.Under the context of Chinese culture,leader treats employees in different ways conforms to Chinese psychological expectation and cultural presupposition,employees have high identity of the differential leadership,therefore the higher employees' Chinese traditionality is,the stronger positive relationship between differential leadership and perceived organizational support is.In addition,the employees who have high organizational trust will adhere to organizational authority,and have high identity of the differential leadership,and have high sense of belonging of organization,therefore the higher employees' organizational trust is,the stronger positive relationship between differential leadership and perceived organizational support is.This research is helpful to understand the transmission mechanism and the boundary conditions of differential leadership to employees' innovative behavior,and it provides the beneficial enlightenment to study the impact of differential leadership on employees' innovative behavior under Chinese situation.