Leader’s Cognitive Style-Employee Type Match And Its Impact On Employees’ Creativity

Leader-employee match is a key factor to improve the efficiency of organizational management,and it has gradually become a cutting-edge topic in the field of management in recent years.Needs-supplies matching has been proved to be a good predictor of employees’ work achievement,but there is a lack of research on it.Previous studies have found that leaders will provide more supply to their preferred employees,in which case the needs of employees can be met.In other words,leaders’ preference for specific types of employees is an important driving force to promote leaders’ needs-employees’ supplies matching.Starting with the implicit followership prototype,this study examined the differences of leaders with different cognitive styles in the implicit followership prototype,that is,the preferred types of employees.In academic circles,leaders’ cognitive style and employee types are divided.Most researchers divide cognitive style into rational cognitive style and intuitive cognitive style.According to employees’ preference for “doing things” or “being human”,employees are divided into task-oriented and relationship-oriented types,which is consistent with the classification of implicit followership prototype.One of the purposes of this study is to find out the matching relationship between rational,intuitive cognitive style leaders and task-oriented,relationship-oriented employees.In addition,studies have shown that the higher the matching degree between leaders and employees,the higher the creativity of employees.Therefore,this study will also examine the impact of leaders’ cognitive style-employee types matching on employees’ creativity,and explore the mediating role of relational energy.In order to verify the above purposes,this study carried out a pre-study and three sub-studies.The pre-study confirmed the effectiveness of the cognitive style starting material,which will be used in study 1a and study 1b.Study 1a used the experimental method to explore among student cadres whether leaders with different cognitive styles have different preferences for employee types among implicit followership prototype.The results showed that leaders with intuitive cognitive style preferred relationship-oriented subordinates,whereas leaders with rational cognitive style showed no significant difference in their preferences.Study 1b also used experimental method to explore whether leaders with different cognitive styles have different preferences for implicit followership prototype among employees in the enterprise.The results showed that leaders with intuitive cognitive style preferred relationship-oriented employees,while leaders with rational cognitive style preferred task-oriented employees.Study 2,in the real enterprise environment,used the method of pairing study to investigate the influence of leaders’ cognitive style and employee type matching on employees’ creativity.The results showed that when rational cognitive style leaders work with task-oriented subordinates(high matching situation),the subordinates will feel higher relational energy and show higher creativity;There was no significant difference in subordinates’ relational energy or creativity whether the intuitive cognitive style leaders work with relationship-oriented subordinates(high matching situation)or task-oriented subordinates(low matching situation).Relational energy plays a mediating role in the influence of leaders’ cognitive style-employee types matching on employees’ creativity.In summary,this study basically found the specific situation of the matching degree between leaders’ cognitive style and employee types.Specifically,rational cognitive style leaders-task-oriented employees,intuitive cognitive style leaders-relationship-oriented employees belong to high matching situation,while rational leaders-relationship-oriented employees,intuitive leaders-task-oriented employees belong to low matching situations.In addition,this study found that leaders’ cognitive style-employee types matching has a positive impact on employees’ creativity by affecting this perceived relational energy.This study highlights the importance of leaders’ cognitive style-employee types matching,and has certain guiding significance for management practice.For the human resources department of the enterprise,when appointing employees,they should pay attention to the matching between the type of employees and the cognitive style of the leaders in the team,and consider assigning the task-oriented employees to the team led by rational cognitive style,while the relationship-oriented employees to the intuitive cognitive style leaders’ team,which constitutes a high matching situation between leaders and employees,thereby enhancing employees’ creativity and achieving the purpose of enterprise innovation.