An Empirical Study Of The Impact Of Inclusive Leadership On Employee Attitudes And Behavior

Abstract:With a higher level of diversity in the workplace, how to manage diversity in the workforce has been becoming an important challenge that is being faced by many business managers, human resource managers and management experts, and research scholars also are paying more and more attention on it. In recent years, with the deepening of research and development of the diversity, inclusion has become an important theory and perspective to explore workplace diversity and its management. In the theoretical framework of inclusion, inclusive leadership that emphasizing the ability to manage diversity and build an inclusive work environment and the effect of it on different levels’organizational performance are becoming an important part in the diversity and inclusion research. Meantime, with the continuous expansion of the research field and content of leadership behavior, inclusive leadership as a specific type of relational leadership, has become one of the current focus in the research of the leading behavior. Literature review found that there are closely link between inclusive leadership and employee attitudes and behavior, however, the current research related to inclusive leadership and its impact on employee attitudes and behavior has just started, most studies remain are about the theoretical discussion, the empirical studies are less. In addition, the "Black box" between leadership and employee attitudes and behaviors has been an important issue for many scholars, the past research also showed that many different leadership behaviors can influence the attitudes and behavior of employees through psychological ownership and team cohesion. However, few studies have examined the role of psychological ownership and team cohesion in the mechanism between inclusive leadership and employee attitudes and behavior. Thus, to explore the influence mechanism of inclusive leadership on attitudes and behavior of employees based on empirical perspective, which will have important theoretical and practical significance for deepening and expanding theory and content of research of diversity, inclusiveness and inclusive leadership Based on the theory of inclusion and inclusive leadership, our research choose turnover intention, counter-productive work behavior and cynicism as an outcome variables of employee attitudes and behavior, psychological ownership as mediator, team cohesion as mediator and moderator, then to build an influence mechanism model of inclusive leadership on employee attitudes and behavior. On this basis, through selecting the survey data and using cross-level mediation and moderation model, the study explore the impact of inclusive leadership on turnover intention, counterproductive work behavior and cynicism, the mediating role of psychological ownership and the mediating and moderating role of team cohesion between inclusive leadership and employee attitudes and behavior.The empirical results show that:inclusive leadership have significant negative impact turnover intention, counter-productive work behavior and cynicism; inclusive leadership has a significant positive effect on psychological ownership; psychological ownership have significant negative impact on turnover intention, counter-productive work behavior and cynicism; psychological ownership partially mediates the impact of inclusive leadership on employee turnover intention, psychological ownership fully mediated the impact of inclusive leadership on counterproductive work behavior, psychological ownership partially mediates the impact of inclusive leadership on employee cynicism; inclusive leadership has a significant positive effect on team cohesion; team cohesion have significant negative impact on turnover intention, counter-productive work behavior and cynicism; team cohesion partially mediates the impact of inclusive leadership on cynicism; team cohesion moderates the impact of inclusive leadership on turnover intention, counter-productive work behavior and cynicism, in other words, compared with the low cohesive team, in the high cohesive team, the impact of inclusive leadership have more significant negative impact on turnover intention, counter-productive work behavior and cynicism.In this study, the conclusions of the study were discussed, the findings of this study not only enrich the content and perspective of inclusion and diversity, and leadership behavior, but also to provide an important guideline for the management practices and decision-making. Specifically, on the one hand, this study expanded and verified the applicability of inclusive leadership in the Chinese cultural context from the perspective of theoretical and empirical, and provided a basis for theoretical and empirical research follow-up studies of inclusive leadership in the Chinese context. On the other hand, this study constructed an influence mechanism model of inclusive leadership on employees’negative attitudes and behavior, groundbreaking research of the "black box" mechanism between inclusive leadership and employees’negative attitudes and behaviors. Meanwhile, the study further investigated and validated the applicability of concepts and theories related to psychological ownership, team cohesion, cynicism in the Chinese cultural background, which provide the corresponding theoretical reference and guidance for the research of these variables. In addition, this study further discussed the deficiencies and limitations as well as future research directions about inclusive leadership.