The Effect Mechanism Of Self-sacrificial Leadership On Employee Stewardship Behavior

In the external competitive environment filled with crisis,organizational survival faces severe challenges,so self-sacrificial behavior of leaders and employees is particularly important for the development of organization.It has been shown that self-sacrificial leadership can motivate employees to engage in extra-role behavior that is beneficial to organization.As an extra-role behavior that benefits the organization at the expense of self-interest,employee stewardship behavior has a similar conceptual connotation to self-sacrificial leadership.However,there are currently few studies on the relationship between self-sacrificial leadership and employee stewardship behavior.Based on the proactive motivation model,this paper selects felt obligation and job embedding as mediating variables and moderating variables respectively,and constructs a moderated mediation model to explore the effect mechanism of self-sacrificial leadership on employee stewardship behavior.In this paper,Spss18.0 and Amos17.0 are used to analyze the questionnaire survey data of 305 employees,the research results support the theoretical hypothesis.This paper finds that self-sacrificial leadership can effectively stimulate employee stewardship behavior,and felt obligation plays a partial mediating role in the process;job embedding positively moderates the relationship between felt obligation and employee stewardship behavior,moreover,it positively regulates the mediating effect of felt obligation,that is,the higher the degree of job embedding,the stronger the mediating effect of felt obligation.This paper has two primary theoretical contribution.First,previous studies on antecedent variables of employee stewardship behavior mainly included organizational culture and organizational situation factors,while few studies explored the influencing factors of employee stewardship behavior from the perspective of leadership.This paper takes self-sacrificial leadership as an important motivating factor of employee stewardship behavior,which expands the research fields on the forming mechanism of employee stewardship behavior based on the perspective of leadership.Second,based on the proactive motivation model,this paper explores the stimulating process of employee stewardship behavior,and expands the theoretical basis on the formation mechanism of employee stewardship behavior.Previous scholars mainly based on the perspective of social exchange theory and social learning theory to explore the effect mechanism between some leadership and employee proactive behavior.As a new theoretical perspective,the proactive motivation model incorporates many variables affecting employee proactive behavior into an integrated research model,so it can better explain the stimulating mechanism of employee stewardship behavior.The results have some management implications for how leaders can motivate employees to make stewardship behaviors.O n the one hand,leaders should advocate dedication in organization and actively implement self-sacrificing behavior for the interest of organization and employees.On the other hand,leaders should pay attention to the cultivation of employees' sense of responsibility,and create a organizational culture full of responsibility.Meanwhile,leaders should help employees establish career plans matching with the organization development and take such measures as stock incentive in order to enhance employees' job embedding,which finally stimulate employee stewardship behavior.