Promoting firm innovativeness through servant leadership and corporate social responsibility to employees

The impact of moral leadership on physical education teachers' innovation behavior: The role of identification with leader and psychological safety

With the growth of people's health needs and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is an inevitable trend to promote innovation behaviors of physical education (PE) teachers to innovate traditional physical education and adapt to national needs of sustainable development in the sports industry. Considering that moral leadership can promote innovation behavior of individuals through psychological factors, this study defines the types of innovation behavior, and from the perspective of psychological safety and identifying with leaders, discusses the impact of moral leadership on individuals' innovation behavior by using hierarchical multivariate regression analysis, which provides inspiration for schools to strengthen the innovation behavior of physical education teachers. In this study, 327 questionnaires were distributed to PE teachers in Chinese provinces and 287 valid questionnaires were collected. The analysis of the collected data was performed with the help of the SPSSAU data analysis platform. The following conclusions were drawn: First, moral leadership has a significant positive impact on the psychological safety and internal and external innovation of physical education teachers. Secondly, moral leadership influences employees' innovation behavior through psychological safety, and plays a part of intermediary role between moral leadership and internal and external innovation behavior; Third, by comparing the two impact mechanisms of innovation behavior, we found that moral leadership encourages employees to produce more external innovation behavior through psychological safety; Finally, strong leadership identity plays a positive role in regulating the relationship between moral leadership and innovation behavior.

The Mediator CSR Plays the Effective Leadership Belief Role for Resource Dilemma Handling Leadership in Organizational Commitment During Sustainability Development

The authors aim to explore a better fitting leadership style that is designed for the sustainable era in believing and committing to work for cherishing resources and developing the organization toward a new sustainable direction. This study developed the questionnaire items of the Resource-Dilemma-Handling-Leadership (RDHL) scale, representing a new sustainable era's new leadership style, and then to compare it with the transformational leadership style in order to highlight the importance of RHDL for sustainable development. This study took companies, which have more than 100 employees in Taiwan as research samples. Those companies were selected because they were socially tagged as being operating continuously for more than 20 years and identifying themselves with the operational orientation of social responsibility as their business philosophy and core values for management. A total of 532 valid questionnaires were collected, with a 90.6% valid return rate, and tested with the SEM method. Consistent with the authors' inferences from the literature, the test results suggest that CSR plays the role of full mediator between RDHL and OC. CSR itself is like a sense of responsibility, giving employees a sense of mission, to complete meaningful sustainability-relevant tasks in the organization. RDHL, compared with TL, has a better prediction power on CSR and OC. Theoretically, this study implies that the impact of leadership of the organization on OC in the aspects of sustainable development should be going through the influence of the ELB system in the form of CSR to promote the organization's internal and external organizational CSR performance, with added internal strengthening power from OC. Practically, the new RDHL concepts brought up by this study include the training and enhancement of leadership skills based on the content of the scale items being explored. The new RDHL scale contains a comprehensive description of the spirit of the new sustainable era's leadership style. Also, the future applications of RDHL ideas in the form of human resource development should help the realization of the ideally sustainability behavioral patterns of leaders and employees in the organizations.

CEO Relational Leadership and Product Innovation Performance: The Roles of TMT Behavior and Characteristics

CEO leadership is considered a critical antecedent of product innovation performance, but the relational aspect of leadership has been largely neglected in this area. Drawing on upper echelons theory and relational leadership literature, this study explores whether, how, and when CEO relational leadership influences product innovation performance. Specifically, we analyze the underlying mechanism of TMT (top management team) voice behavior and two boundary conditions—TMT educational level and TMT age. Based on multi-source and multi-wave data on 105 Chinese firms, this study finds that CEO relational leadership plays an important role in promoting product innovation performance through the intervening mechanism of TMT voice behavior. Furthermore, the positive relationship between CEO relational leadership and TMT voice behavior is stronger in TMTs with higher educational level and lower age. This study contributes to the existing literature by empirically examining the under-investigated relationship between CEO relational leadership and product innovation performance, and by disentangling the underlying mechanism and boundary conditions.

Whom to serve? Exploring the moral dimension of servant leadership: answers from operation Valkyrie

Purpose

The article aims at examining the ethical limits and risks of servant leadership. During the Second World War, the German army officer Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg is a loyal servant to his nation and homeland. But when he learns about the Nazis’ mass murders and crimes, he begins to have doubts about whom he should serve. Being confronted with numerous moral dilemmas, he finally decides to join a resistance group. Of course, Stauffenberg's situation as colonel and leader was an extreme case. Time and again, however, managers and leaders are faced with similar dilemmas. Indeed, the current COVID-19-crisis shows that even today’s leaders are repeatedly faced with almost insoluble dilemmas. The recent literature about ethics and leadership suggests a philosophy which is almost portrayed as a panacea to any ethical issues: servant leadership (SL). This study, however, questions the commonly held view that SL is always ethical. The purpose of our historical case study is twofold. First, this study explores the ethical challenges Stauffenberg (and other officers) faced and how they dealt with them. Second, this study elaborates on what responses (if any) SL would provide to these challenges.

Design/methodology/approach

The applied method is a historical case study, in which the authors draw on a plethora of secondary literature, including books, reports, and articles.

Findings

By analyzing the historical case of “Operation Valkyrie,” this study elaborated and identified risks and limitations of SL and pointed out ways to address these risks. In particular, SL poses risks in the case of a too narrow understanding of the term “service.”

Originality/value

While other leadership styles, e.g. transformational leadership or charismatic leadership, have been extensively studied with regard to ethical risks, in the case of SL possible risks and limitations are still largely unexplored.