The Influence Mechanism Of Employees' Loyalty, Extra-role Behaviors And Team Innovation Performance

Following the logic as "employee's loyalty with multi-bases multi-foci structure influences individual extra-role behavior, and through the shared and configural emergence in the team level, the extra-role behavior has impact on innovation performance of the whole technological innovation team", this paper analyzes the effect direction, effect strength and interactive model of employees'affective, continuance and normative loyalties to organization, supervisor, team and profession on their helping and voice behaviors in the context of Chinese culture, explores the influences of team characteristics such as function, structure, size and longevity on the relation between employee's loyalty and extra-role behavior, and then investigates the direct and interactive effects of different kinds of team-level extra-role behaviors on different aspects of team innovation performance, as well as the impacts of different behavioral structures of extra-role behaviors in the team level on team innovation performance. This paper proceeds through three studies:the analysis of the dominant effect of multi-foci loyalties on extra-role behavior, the analysis of the interactive effect of multi-bases loyalties on extra-role behavior, and the analysis of the cross-level effect of extra-role behavior on team innovation performance. The main research conclusions are summarized as following:(1) The influence mechanism of employee's loyalty with multi-bases multi-foci structure on individual extra-role behavior is recognizedThis paper investigates the dominant effect of multi-foci loyalties and the interactive effect of multi-bases loyalties in the process of influencing helping and voice extra-role behavior, by corresponding the multi-foci multi-bases structure of loyalty with the difference in target and nature of helping and voice behaviors. The results show that, the extra-role behaviors directed to different target can be predicted by loyalties to different target, helping behavior is mainly affected by loyalty to team, supervisor and organization while voice behavior is mainly affected by loyalty to organization and profession. On the other hand, the extra-role behaviors with different nature can be influenced by different interactive model between multi-bases loyalties, multi-bases loyalties exert substitutive interaction on affiliative helping behavior while exert complementary interaction on challenging voice behavior. In addition, the interactive model also varies with the difference in loyalty bases, affective loyalty and normative loyalty have synergistic interaction on extra-role behavior while affective loyalty and continuance loyalty have competitive interaction on extra-role behavior.(2) The influence of contextual factors on the relation between individual loyalty and extra-role behavior is identifiedThis paper examines the influence of cultural context and team context on the relation between loyalty and extra-role behavior in the individual level. On one hand, based on the analysis of Chinese traditional culture, this paper finds the negative impact of supervisory normative loyalty on criticizing voice behavior which discovers the unique rule different from the research finding in western country. On the other hand, this paper identifies the influences of team characteristics such as function, structure, size and longevity on the relation between individual loyalty and extra-role behavior. It is indicated that team function and team structure may influence the effect strength of different loyalty foci in that supervisory loyalty has greater impact in teams performing production task and in permanent teams with functional structure while professional loyalty has greater impact in teams performing innovation task and in temporary teams with cross-functional structure. It is also found that team size and team longevity may influence the effect strength of different loyalty bases. As the team size increases, the effect of affective loyalty decreases and the effect of normative loyalty increases, while as the team size increases, the effects of affective loyalty and normative loyalty both increase.(3) The cross-level influence mechanism of employee's extra-role behavior on team innovation performance is discoveredThis paper also explores the cross-level influence mechanism about how extra-role behavior in the individual level has impact on team innovation performance through the shared and configural emergence in the team level. The results demonstrate that different kinds of team-level shared helping and voice behaviors have both direct and interactive effects on different aspects of team innovation performance. The operational efficiency of technological innovation team is positively influenced by problem-solving helping behavior, knowledge-sharing helping behavior, criticizing voice behavior, and the interaction between problem-solving/knowledge-sharing helping behavior and criticizing voice behavior, while the innovation effectiveness of technological innovation team is positively influenced by knowledge-sharing helping behavior, initiating voice behaviors, criticizing voice behavior, and the interaction between knowledge-sharing helping behavior and initiating/criticizing voice behavior. On the other hand, different behavioral structures of helping and voice behaviors in the team level have different impacts on team innovation performance. The results indicate that the mean of individual helping and voice behaviors within the team, the minimum value of individual helping behavior and the maximum value of individual voice behavior within the team, the variance of individual voice behavior within the team all have positive effects on team innovation performance.In conclusion, this paper studies employee loyalty in a multi-bases multi-foci integrative framework, analyzes the different influence mechanisms of multi-bases multi-foci loyalties on helping and voice extra-role behaviors, and explores the cross-level influence mechanism about how individual-level extra-role behaviors emergent in the team level and then impact team innovation performance. The findings of this paper improve the research framework of multi-bases multi-foci loyalties, deepen the understanding about the essential differences between different kinds of extra-role behaviors, enrich the theory about team-level extra-role behavior, introduce a new perspective to the research of team innovation, and provide theoretical instruction for the management practice of technological innovation team.