高管领导行为对组织认知和技术创新绩效的影响:区分高管是否为创始人的实证研究

The Impact of Leadership on Organizational Cognition and Technological Innovation Performance: an Empirical Research of Distinguish Whether Leaders are the Founders or not

基于中国情境,从组织认知的视角揭示企业高管领导行为对技术创新绩效的影响机理,并考察高管是否为企业创始人这一在领导作用机制研究中被忽视的关键情境因素的影响。运用309家企业样本对各变量间关系进行了实证检验。结果如下:(1)高管变革型和交易型领导行为分别对组织创造型认知和分析型认知具有显著正向影响,组织创造型认知和分析型认知分别对技术创新绩效具有显著正向和负向影响;(2)组织创造型认知在高管变革型领导行为与技术创新绩效间起部分中介作用,组织分析型认知在高管交易型领导行为与技术创新绩效间起部分中介作用;(3)当高管是企业创始人时,其领导行为对组织认知的影响效果更为显著。研究将战略领导理论、变革型和交易型领导理论、认知风格理论和技术创新理论进行了有意义的整合,为揭示高管通过组织认知影响技术创新的内部作用机理做出了一定贡献。

Previous research on leadership focused mostly on individual or team level. However, the literature on leadership from the perspective of the whole organization is rare. The existing research is still in the preliminary stage to explore the effect of mediators and moderators on the relationship between leadership and technological innovation performance. In addition, the current literature ignores to distinguish whether top leaders are founders or not. This article intends to develop new theories to close the knowledge gap. In the context of Chinese companies, this article explores the effect of leadership behavior on technological innovation performance from the perspective of organizational cognition. Moreover, this study distinguishes whether leaders are founders or not. After analyzing data collected from 309 companies in China, we found that transformation and transaction leadership have significant effect on organizational creative cognition and analytic cognition, respectively. Organizational creative cognition and analytic cognition have significant positive and negative effect on technological innovation performance, respectively. Organizational creative cognition partially mediates the relationship between transformation leadership and technological innovation performance. Organizational analytic cognition partially mediates the relationship between transaction leadership and technology innovation performance. When leaders are founders, their leadership significantly affects organizational cognition. This paper makes three contributions to the current literature. First, Chinese society has a strong culture of centralized power. In this culture, this study breaks through the dominant research paradigm on the Upper Echelon Theory that focuses on TMT, and explores the mechanism with which top individual leaders impact technological innovation performance. Our study enriches the leadership theory. Second, In order to be more helpful in revealing the mechanism with which top leaders affect technological innovation performance, this study introduces organizational cognition as a mediating factor, including both cognitive properties and long-term stability variables, to verify the mediating effect of organizational cognition. This study provides an explanation from the perspective of cognitive psychology to uncover the ＂black box＂ relationship between leadership behavior and technological innovation performance. Third, this study is also the first attempt to validate the crucial role of founders in organizational cognition and technology innovation performance. By verifying the influence of founders or non-founders, this study provides insights that found-leaders may be an important driving force for the operation of technological innovation performance. This study integrates many theories, including strategic leadership theory, transformation and transaction leadership theory entrepreneurship theory, cognitive style theory and technology innovation theory. In addition, this study makes contributions to the current literature on the internal mechanism with which top leaders impact technological innovation performance via organizational cognition.