领导幽默如何激发员工创新:一个双中介模型的检验

How Does Leader Humor Stimulate Employees’Innovation?A Dual Process Model Analysis

最近,领导幽默的研究在西方学界开始兴起,部分学者尝试运用组织管理和心理学领域的成熟理论来解释这一现象并取得了一定进展。然而,有关领导幽默如何影响个体的创新行为,现有研究并未给出令人满意的答案。基于自我效能理论和社会信息加工理论,通过365对直接领导与下属两个时点的配对问卷调查,结果表明:领导幽默对员工的创新行为有显著的正向影响;创新自我效能感和心理安全感在二者之间起到中介作用;个体的外向性不仅正向调节了领导幽默与创新自我效能感和心理安全感之间的关系,还进一步调节领导幽默通过创新自我效能感和心理安全感影响员工创新行为的间接路径。

Creativity and innovation drive progress and allow organizations to maintain competitive advantage.In recent years,both industry and academia have placed a premium upon creativity and innovation,and research in the field has burgeoned and generated tons of compelling findings.Though numerous studies have shown the importance of leadership style in predicting employees’innovative behavior,few of them have reviewed leader humor,a behavior enacted by a leader and directed toward a subordinate that is intended to be amusing to the subordinate and that the subordinate perceives as an intentional act.The current study aims to address this research gap.Specifically,drawing from self-efficacy theory and social information processing theory,we propose a dual process model that leader humor enhances employees’innovative behavior via creative self-efficacy and psychological safety.We further investigate the moderating effect of employees’extraversion personality in the model.To test our hypotheses,we collected a field data from three internet firms located in the Eastern China region.In order to avoid the common method bias,subordinates and their direct supervisors participated in this survey at two time points.At Time 1,we invited subordinates to assess their perceived leader humor,extraversion personality,creative self-efficacy,psychological safety and demographic information.At Time 2,that is,one month later,the direct supervisor rated subordinate’s innovative behavior.Ultimately,365 dyads completed the two-wave survey.We used SPSS 22.0 and Mplus 7.4 to analyze the data.First,we assessed the discriminant validity of the key variables through a series of confirmatory factor analyses(CFAs)and examined the common method variance.Afterwards,we used the Structural Equation Modeling(SEM)and bias-corrected bootstrap sampling method to test our hypotheses.The results showed that:(1)leader humor was positively related to employees’innovative behavior(β=0.44,p<0.01);(2)creative self-efficacy(β=0.06,p<0.001)and psychological safety(β=0.38,p<0.001)mediated the relationship between leader humor and employees’innovative behavior,and the confidence interval of 5000-time bootstrap sampling also supported these results;(3)individual extraversion personality positively moderated the relationship between leader humor and creative self-efficacy(β=0.18,p<0.001),as well as the relationship between leader humor and psychological safety(β=0.09,p<0.05),such that the positive relationships were stronger for those employees with higher,rather than lower,levels of extraversion personality;(4)individual extraversion personality also positively moderated the indirect effects between leader humor and employees’innovative behavior via creative self-efficacy and psychological safety mediation.That is,the higher the extraversion personality was,the stronger the mediating relationships were.Those conclusions enrich the leader humor literature,and the main theoretical contributions are as follows.First,we investigate the effects of leader humor on employees’innovative behavior,which extends our understanding of how leader humor is related to other employees outcomes.Second,this research reveals and supports the mediating effects of creative self-efficacy and psychological safety upon the relationship between leader humor and employees’innovative behavior based on self-efficacy theory and social information processing theory.This provides additional avenues for research on how leader humor influences individual outcomes.Finally,by demonstrating individual extraversion personality as a crucial contingency that moderates the effects of leader humor,we broaden our understanding about the conditions under which leader humor induces more favorable work outcomes.Beyond these theoretical contributions,the results also provide implications on how organizations may stimulate their employees’innovative behavior.Our findings suggest that leaders can use more humor through their interaction with subordinates,which is closely related to their employees’innovative behavior.In addition,since leader humor is more effective for subordinates with higher level of extroversion personality,it reminds leaders should always use humor in a more appropriate way.