Research On The Effect Of Differential Leadership On Employee Innovation Behavior

As the key factor of enterprises' competitiveness and survival,innovation has become one of the hot issues in theory and practice day by day.In real working,there are many employees with creative thinking and professional knowledge,but they can not gain the full recognition and respect by the work team,and these factors lead to the employee innovation is rare.Past research has shown that leaders play an important role in determining employees' work allocation,performance appraisal and promotion,they also play a decisive role in promoting employees' innovation.In recent years,with China's rise to become the economic power,researchers have begun to focus on the unique leadership styles of Chinese enterprises.As a specific leadership style,differential leadership is attracting more and more people's attention.In the context of Chinese culture,the phenomenon of leaders' differential treatment is widespread,and it plays a unique role in management practice.However,the empirical research on the impact of differential leadership on employees' innovation behavior is little at present.Therefore,it is of great theoretical and practical significance to carry out an empirical study on the influence of differential leadership style on employees' innovation behavior.From the perspective of the integration of self-categorization theory and Situational Strength theory,this research collated and summarized the existing research on differential leadership,perceived insider status,employee innovation behavior and team innovation climate.By logical deduction and summarization,this research proposes related hypotheses and constructs theoretical models.On this basis,we select enterprise team members which come from guangxi,guangdong,jaingxi,etc.to carry out the investigation.This research combined questionnaire with email to collect datas,and 86 work teams with 402 effective questionnaire copies had been recycled.This research used SPSS,MPLUS and HLM to standardized and analyzed the data.Firstly,the reliability and validity of the questionnaire are tested to ensure the reliability and validity of the data,then we analyzed the relationship between variables by descriptive statistical analysis and related analysis.Finally,multilevel linear model is used to verify the theoretical hypothesis and research model.The empirical results demonstrate that: differential leadership positively related to employees' innovative behavior,and perceived insider status plays a mediating role in the relationship between differential leadership and employee innovative behavior;team innovation climate positively moderates the relationship between perceived insider status and employees' innovative behavior.The relevant conclusions of this study can also provide practical guidance for leaders to promote employees' innovation behavior.First of all,in the process of exerting leadership effectiveness,differential leadership should be committed to becoming an efficient leader,so as to show greater leadership charm to drive team members to innovate.Secondly,it is necessary to pay attention to the perceived insider status of team members,work team can create positive emotional clues conducive to promote the perceived insider status of employees,so as to enhance the sense of responsibility and mission of team members,and promote employees to make more extra-role behaviors that is beneficial to the enterprises.Finally,by creating a working environment and atmosphere conducive to innovation,the work team can help employees reduce the risk of innovation and enhance their willingness to innovate,thus generating more innovative behaviors.