真诚型领导行为对团队创造力的影响

The Impact of Authentic Leadership Behavior on Team Creativity

近年来,激烈的市场竞争对组织的创新能力提出了更高的要求。除个人创造力以外,如何提高组织中的团队创造力越来越受到学者和管理者的共同关注。从团队层面检验真诚型领导行为对创造力的积极影响,并对与团队创造力紧密相关的反馈寻求氛围、团队中的地位冲突水平、任务依存性等影响因素进行综合分析和检验;利用问卷调查方式,收集中国东北地区8家企业、84个团队、两个时间点的数据,进行回归分析。研究结果表明,真诚型领导行为对团队创造力有显著的积极影响;反馈寻求氛围对真诚型领导行为与团队创造力之间的积极关系起中介作用;团队中的地位冲突会削弱真诚型领导行为与反馈寻求氛围之间的正向关系,即当团队中的地位冲突水平较低时真诚型领导行为对反馈寻求氛围的积极影响更大,当团队中的地位冲突水平较高时这种积极影响会被削弱;任务依存性对反馈寻求氛围与团队创造力之间积极关系的调节作用没有得到数据支持。研究结果验证了真诚型领导行为对团队创造力的作用机制和积极效果,引入反馈寻求氛围的概念解释真诚型领导行为风格对团队创造力的作用机制,在分析真诚型领导行为与反馈寻求氛围之间起到调节作用时运用地位冲突这个较新的概念,为未来的相关研究奠定了基础,对组织管理实践有一定的启示作用。

Nowadays, rapid change of external environment and fierce market competition has called organizations for a continuous growing capability of innovation. In addition to individual creativity, both scholars and practitioners start to focus on how to improve team creativity. In our research, we investigate the impact of authentic leadership behavior on team creativity from a meso perspective and comprehensively analyze and test other impacting factors over team creativity including feedback-seeking climate, status conflict, and task interdependence. By survey, we collected data of 84 working teams in 8 organizations located in northeastern China from 2 time points and used statistical method to analyze it. We proved that （1）authentic leadership behavior had a significantly positive impact over team creativity; （2）the positive relationship between authentic leadership behavior and team creativity was mediated by feedback-seeking climate in the team; （3）status conflict in teams would moderate the positive relationship between authentic leadership behavior and feedback-seeking climate in the way that when there was high level of status conflict in the team, the positive relationship between authentic leadership behavior and feedback-seeking climate would be weakened. However, the moderating effect of task interdependence on the relationship between feedback-seeking climate and team creativity was not supported by data. Our research has made contributions to both theoretical development and management practice. First, our research shift research focus from the relationship between leadership style and individual creativity to its relationship with team creativity. We proved the positive relationship between authentic leadership behavior and team creativity by making theoretical argument and data analyses. Our research also made contributions to the studies on leadership style and team creativity. Second, our research explained the mechanism of how authentic leadership behavior would cast impact on team creativity by employing feedback-seeking climate. We also employed status conflict to analyze its moderation over the relationship between authentic leadership behavior and feedback-seeking climate. These developments made paves for future relevant studies. Third, this research had some inspiration for the practice of organizational management. This research revealed that leaders should conduct more authentic leadership behavior so that they can encourage employees to raise their self-awareness, internalized moral perspective, balanced processing, relational transparency and increase team creativity. Meanwhile, they should try to prevent status conflict in the team to prohibit its buffering effect. Future studies may consider more about the cross-level impact from organizational culture on team creativity. They should collect data from other countries or other regions to further test the conclusions we have reached in our research. Further more, there should be better ways to identify whether employees could recognize authentic leadership behavior and increase the credibility and validity of this study.