Do Employees Dare To Improvise Under Authoritarian Leadership?

As technology develops,society advances and the market becomes more competitive,companies are increasingly looking to improvisation by frontline staff in order to respond to the ever-changing demands.However,improvisation,as an unplanned and daring experiment,has a high degree of uncertainty in its outcome.Because improvisation can be a trial-and-error process,subordinates need a relaxed organizational/team atmosphere,especially the empowerment and tolerance of their direct leaders.However,the traditional Chinese ideology of authoritarian leadership,known as "patriarchal",has been described by many scholars as a typical "negative leadership",and many studies have shown that its behavioral style may stifle the generation of professional advice,hinder the sustainable growth of the company and bring many negative effects to employees.In this context,how does the traditional leadership behavior(authoritarian leadership)and the emerging demands of the times(subordinates’ improvisation)collide and how can they be reconciled?Through a review of the existing literature,this study found that most of the research on the antecedents of improvisation has been conducted on positive leadership,exploring how leaders motivate improvisational behavior;little has been done on what leadership might deter improvisational behavior and how it works.In order to truly understand the mechanisms of leadership on employee improvisation,based on social information processing theory,this study examines the micro-level process by which authoritarian leaders indirectly curb subordinates’ improvisation through perceived managerial intolerance of errors from a negative leadership perspective,and introduces leader-member exchange relationships(LMX)and task complexity to explore this process in depth.Overall,this study constructs a conditional indirect effects model based on ’relationship’ and ’environment’ to systematically explore the mechanisms of authoritarian leadership influence on subordinates’ improvisation.The hypotheses were tested through an empirical survey of a sample of 319 matched leader-employee pairs in China,and the moderated mediating effects analysis using SPSS and Mplus software.The results show that:(1)authoritarian leadership positively influences subordinates’ perceived managerial intolerance of errors;(2)perceived managerial intolerance of errors negatively influences subordinates’ improvisation;(3)perceived managerial intolerance of errors plays a mediating role in the negative relationship between authoritarian leadership and subordinates’ improvisation;and(4)the indirect negative influence of authoritarian leadership on subordinates’ improvisation through subordinates’ perceived managerial intolerance of errors is moderated by LMX,which decreases when the level of LMX is high and increases when it is not;(5)the negative influence of authoritarian leadership on subordinates’ improvisation through subordinates’ perceived managerial intolerance of errors is moderated by task complexity,and this indirect negative influence decreases when the complexity of the task is high,and increases when it is not.The findings of this study have the following theoretical implications:(1)The relationship between authoritarian leadership and subordinates’ improvisational behavior is explored for the first time from the perspective of negative leadership,which not only enriches the research on the relationship between leadership and subordinates’ improvisational behavior,but also expands the research on the outcomes of authoritarian leadership.(2)Based on social information processing theory,this study uncovers the "black box" mechanism by which authoritarian leaders indirectly curb subordinates’ improvisation through perceived managerial intolerance of errors.(3)Through a dual perspective,the question of why subordinates still dare to improvise under authoritarian leadership is answered in detail.The findings of this study are also relevant to practice:(1)Leaders should be fully aware of the dangers of authoritarian style-it can seriously undermine the willingness of subordinates to improvise.(2)When organizational performance is more dependent on the improvisation of subordinates,senior management should try to avoid the introduction of authoritarian leaders when recruiting.(3)Employees should take the initiative to improve their skills in dealing with authoritarian leaders and work to improve LMX to increase leadership tolerance.(4)Leaders should be wary of subconsciously and inappropriately tolerating the improvisational behavior of high LMX subordinates in order to avoid fostering perceptions of unfairness among other low LMX subordinates,which could lead to unintended consequences.