Authentic Climate, Authentic Leadership And Creativity: A Multi-level Perspective

Employee creativity has become the key to competitive advantage and organizational survival. With the comprehensive development of science and technology, collaborative community-based cross-organizational cooperation, even R & D team to gradually replace the lonely hero’s individual employee innovation model as a direct driving force for organizational innovation. Leaders who can inspire employee creativity and team creativity at the same time has been widely commended for the practice. On the other hand, authentic leadership theory which based on the personal qualities of leadership, dedication and exemplary role and impact of Subordinate’s values, has led the study of the Western frontier. Leader of "virtue" has a good fit of Chinese traditional culture. Therefore, this research focus on "authentic leadership how impacted the creativity on the individual and team level".First, this research proves the authentic leadership in China. When Chinese evaluated a leader, people tend to expect leaders "equal ability and virtue integrity". Although Chinese admitted the organization’s job functions and team sustain function were also the necessary part of leaders’work, but the leader’s virtue quality was special attention. It’s due to the different understanding of the leaders’ conceptualization between Chinese and westerners. A leader having equal ability and virtue integrity can lead to positive the behavior of the individual and team behavior. Therefore, study on the authentic leadership in the Chinese context leadership, employee behavior and the influence of team behavior will help us enrich theoretical.Second, this research establishes the relationship between creativity and authentic leadership. Existing studies are still focused on individual level, such as transformational leadership, supportive leadership and employee creativity of the mechanism. There are two shortcomings:caring leader "Efficiency", the effectiveness of management of the impact on employee creativity, but ignored the leader’s "virtue" impact on employee creativity. In fact, leader’s "virtue" will also affect the attitude of subordinate series. When subordinates perceive the authentic leader by example, their feel more superior support, thus promoting the upgrading of employee creativity. On the other hand, the research method is still limited to individual-level. Not only can’t explain how the leader of the internal climate of the whole team have an effect on team creativity, but also difficult to explain how authentic climate effect on employee creativity. Based on the above analysis, this study will build the authentic climate, authentic leadership and creativity on the multi-level perspective, focusing on logical relationship between the authentic climate and team creativity, among the authentic climate, authentic leadership and employee creativity.Third, this research tests the western scale in the context of China. To guarantee the reliability and validity of the measurement instrument, the author tried to adopt the existing scales that previous literature has already developed to be used as collecting the empirical evidence. Employee evaluate the authentic leadership, superior support, team mutual and team creativity, leaders evaluate the employee creativity. Selected control variables such as employee and leaders’individual characteristics, team characteristics of team size, team development stage and task progress status. In the formal large scale investigation, in order to achieve the research objectives, the author invite two team leader (one with 5 years’, another with 8 years’ team leader experience)and eight R&D team members (average with 3.15 years’R&D team work experience)who work in Wuhan. Then, the author divided them into five groups (each group invite one to three) have a face-to-face discussion group. Some changes were made on questionnaire items, question sequence, word expressions according to the result of pretest. The date was collected from 13 cities and 113 R&D teams during the period of April to August 2010.Fourth, the research conclusions were as follows:(1) Individual-level authentic leadership has a positively related to employee creativity; (2)Team-level authentic climate has a positively related to employee creativity; (3) Team-level authentic climate has a positively related to team creativity; (4) Superior support not mediates the positive relationship between authentic leadership and employee creativity; (5) team mutual mediates the positive relationship between authentic climate and team creativity; (6) team mutual mediates the positive relationship between authentic climate and employee creativity; (7) Superior support mediates the positive relationship between authentic climate and employee creativity.The findings of this dissertation are to enrich authentic leadership and creativity theory, also has a great significance to guide China’s R&D team leader’s practice work. The four contributions are focused on:(1) Developing authentic leadership’s empirical study from individual level to team level, proving authentic leadership in the team; (2) Finding a multiple levels mechanisms among the authentic climate, authentic leadership and creative, a new direction for the integration of leadership and creativity research; (3) Proving superior support mediates the positive relationship between authentic climate and employee creativity, team mutual mediates the positive relationship between authentic climate and team creativity, building the "bridges" between authentic climate and creativity; (4) Testing the western scholars have put forth the theory of authentic leadership in the Chinese Localization.Finally, due to the limitation of the author’s knowledge and ability, as well as some external limitations, this research remains some limitations such as nonrandomized sampling, cross-sectional research, limited survey objectives. Much improvement is needed in future studies.