Authentic Leadership, Traditionality, and Interactional Justice in the Chinese Context. 真实型领导力、传统性与交互公平感在中国环境中的关系

Nurses’ feeling trusted and knowledge hiding: The role of psychological safety, felt obligation and traditionality

Knowledge hiding is one of the dilemmas of organizational knowledge management. For nurses, knowledge hiding behavior is not conducive to improving the quality and efficiency of their work and hinders the innovation of nursing services. Based on the social exchange theory, the current study constructed a moderated mediation model by taking psychological safety and felt obligation as mediating variables, and traditionality as moderating variable, and explored the mechanism of feeling trusted affecting knowledge hiding behavior. The empirical research based on 285 nurses from China shows that feeling trusted is negative correlate with knowledge hiding behavior; feeling trusted can negatively affect knowledge hiding by enhancing psychological safety and felt obligation; traditionality can positively moderate the relationship between feeling trusted and felt obligation, and feeling trusted has a stronger positive influence on felt obligation of highly traditional nurses; traditionality has no significant moderating effect between feeling trusted and psychological safety. Theoretically, this study supplements the influencing factors of knowledge hiding, examines the complex mechanism between feeling trusted and knowledge hiding and supplements the boundary conditions for feeling trusted to play its role from the perspective of individual characteristics (i.e., traditionality). From the perspective of practical implication, this study suggests that managers should pay attention to using trust strategies to enhance subordinates’ psychological safety and felt obligation, especially for highly traditional nurses, thus reducing knowledge hiding.

Cross-Level Influence of Empowering Leadership on Constructive Deviance: The Different Roles of Organization-Based Self-Esteem and Traditionality

At present, scholars have mainly focused on the individual-level influencing factors of constructive deviance, and few studies have concerned the motivating mechanism of empowering leadership on constructive deviance. Based on the conservation of resources theory, this study explored the cross-level influence of empowering leadership on constructive deviance in the Chinese cultural context. With the data of 85 leaders and 383 paired employees which were collected in two waves with one-month time lag, the results demonstrated that empowering leadership motivated employees to actively implement constructive deviance, and that organization-based self-esteem played a mediating role in the relationship. The high traditionality of employees weakened not only the positive effect of organization-based self-esteem on constructive deviance, but also the mediating role of organization-based self-esteem. This study lays a theoretical basis and provides some practical guidance for leaders to take effective empowerment strategies to motivate employees to engage in constructive deviance.

How Servant Leadership Sparks Feedback-Seeking Behavior: A Moderated Mediation Model

Drawing upon social information processing theory, we propose that moqi with supervisors mediates the relationship between servant leadership and follower feedback-seeking behavior. Subordinates’ traditionality plays a moderating role in this process. A total of 440 Chinese working adults responded to the two-wave questionnaire survey in paper and pencil forms. Correlation analyses, mediation analysis, and moderated mediation analysis was performed through R and SPSS PROCESS Macro. The results revealed that servant leadership positively correlates with followers’ feedback-seeking behavior via moqi with supervisors. Moreover, these indirect effects of servant leadership were moderated by traditionality, such that servant leadership had weaker relations with feedback-seeking behavior when traditionality was higher (vs. lower). Theoretical contributions and practical implications, limitations and suggestions for further study were discussed.

Leader–member exchange as a mediator of the relationship between authentic leadership and employee creativity

The purpose of this study was to acquire meaningful insights on the determinants of creativity with a meticulous examination, and by dint of that, expand the concerned literature. To accomplish the same, a conceptual model that includes authentic leadership, employee creativity, and leader–member exchange (LMX) was methodically developed and evaluated. This research is a quantitative study incorporating a self-report survey. The data were amassed from hotel employees in Northern Cyprus. Data from 314 applicable surveys were analyzed using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS)-22 and analysis of a moment structures (AMOS)-18 programs. Based on the findings, it can be deduced that authentic leadership has a considerable impact on employee creativity, while LMX plays an intermediary role in this relationship. The results of this study are useful and relevant for both researchers and policymakers.

Authentic Leadership and Improved Individual Performance: Affective Commitment and Individual Creativity's Sequential Mediation

Authentic leadership has become increasingly important in the literature, attracting the attention of many scholars in the last decade. This study adopted an employee-centered perspective to guide its examination of the relationship between authentic leadership and individual performance and investigation of the sequential mediation of employees' affective commitment and individual creativity. An analysis was conducted of data collected from 214 employees working in different business sectors. The results reveal a statistically significant positive relationship between authentic leadership and employees' workplace performance, which are both directly connected and indirectly linked through the two proposed psychosocial mechanisms. The findings thus indicate that authentic leadership reinforces workers' emotional connection with their organizations, thereby increasing their individual creativity and, subsequently, promoting better on-the-job performance. This study presents new and significant results since, on the one hand, it relied on a sequential mediation analysis of variables and, on the other hand, integrated the four main constructs into a single model. The proposed model displays the chain of effects between authentic leadership, affective commitment, individual creativity, and employee workplace performance. Implications for organizational management are discussed.

How Authentic Leadership Promotes Individual Creativity: The Mediating Role of Affective Commitment

This study sought to provide a more comprehensive understanding of how authentic leadership can affect employees’ individual creativity through affective commitment’s mediating role. The sample included 177 leader–follower dyads from 26 private, small- and medium-sized enterprises. Followers reported their levels of affective commitment and perceptions of authentic leadership, and leaders assessed each follower’s level of creativity. The results show that authentic leadership has a positive impact on affective commitment and creativity. Moreover, affective commitment fully mediates the relationship between perceived authentic leadership and individual creativity. Organizations can thus increase employees’ affective commitment and creativity by encouraging their managers to adopt more authentic leadership styles. Additional studies with larger samples are needed to determine more clearly not only authentic leadership’s influence on individual creativity but also other psychosocial and personal variables’ effects on that relationship.

Business Leadership in the Chinese Context: Trends, Findings, and Implications

Business leaders constitute a powerful driving force for the miraculous growth of the Chinese economy in the past few decades. However, scholars have not developed theories accounting for the unique leadership phenomenon in the Chinese context, characterized by high uncertainty, intense market competition, and constant changes in government regulations and policies. This special issue aims at offering insights regarding business leadership in China. In this paper, we first introduce the three streams of Chinese leadership research, varying in the degree of Chinese context being considered in theory development. We then discuss how Chinese leadership has co-evolved with the transformation of firms and the institutional environment in China. The new values of young employees, born after 1980, are driving the need for leaders to adjust their leadership practices once again. After that, we present a summary of the four papers in this special issue, and the insights they provide to our understanding of leadership and its effectiveness in the Chinese context. Finally, we suggest future research directions for Chinese leadership research.