Research On The Influence Of Leader Narcissism And Goal Orientation On Team Creativity

Leader factors have been verified to have pivotal influence on team creativity.Along with the penetration of western individualism, leaders who possess narcissistic personality have emerged more often than ever in Chinese context. Relatively little scholarly attention, however, has been given to leaders factors in the team creativity literature. Practice has shown that individuals who are in the position of leaders all exhibit more or less narcissism, which is in a higher level on the whole compared with ordinary people. Narcissism, together with Machiavellianism and psychopath,constitutes the Dark Triad of personality. What is the influence of narcissism on leaders when they exhibit narcissism? Existing literature starts to pay attention to executive managers, such as the influence of CEO narcissism on performance.However, along with the promotion of teams function and position, the influence of team leader narcissism on performance, especially team creativity, has aroused our attention.It has reached no consensus about the influence of narcissistic leader on employee behavior, this study believes that there may be some interactions between narcissism and other important personalities, which influences team creativity together. Combined with vital antecedent variables in creativity research and knowledge economy in the new era, this study,according to theory of knowledge management, further introduces team learning and knowledge sharing as mediator so as to analyze the influence of leader narcissism on team creativity. Based on the purpose above, this study proposes three questions: (1) discussion on the influence of leader narcissism on team creativity; (2) analysis of the interaction between narcissistic personality and goal orientation; (3) introduction about the mediation mechanism of knowledge management. According to self-enhancement theory and knowledge management theory, along with the logic of “leadership trait - team behavior - team performance",this study first discusses which influence leader narcissism can bring to team creativity, and then analyzes whether goal orientation can enhance positive influence or weaken negative influence. Focusing on research question, this study proposes two kinds of hypothesis, one is about the influence of leader narcissism on team creativity, and the other is about the influence of interactions on team creativity, with mediation hypothesis using knowledge sharing and team learning as mediator.This study involved six economic development zones in five southern areas of Jiang Su Province, and every zone recommended ten firms which we selected three working teams to investigate on average in each firm, generating a sample of 180 teams in 60 firms. The questionnaire was distributed to team leaders and team members, with 163 validated questionnaires from team leaders matched with 1524 validated questionnaires from team members, the whole questionnaires were finally aggregated to 163 validated team samples. By regression models examining proposed hypotheses,results showed that leader narcissism can promote team creativity,but both team learning and knowledge sharing cannot mediate the relationship between leader narcissism and team creativity. The findings further indicated that the interaction between leader narcissism and learning goal orientation together with performance prove goal orientation can significantly promote team creativity, but the interaction between leader narcissism and performance avoid goal orientation can significantly constrain team creativity. Besides, knowledge sharing can partially or totally mediate the relationship between the interaction of leader narcissism and three kinds of goal orientation and team creativity, except for prove goal orientation.Similar to knowledge sharing, team learning can partially or totally mediate the relationship between the interaction of leader narcissism and three kinds of goal orientation and team creativity.This study analyzes the influence of leader narcissism and leader goal orientation on team creativity, which can help to better understand how to reduce the negative influence of leader narcissism and transform it into more constructive aspects. This interaction between leader narcissism and goal orientation can help to explain whether narcissistic leader is a good leader or not, which is consistent with the study trend of analyzing leader traits by synthesis. Furthermore, this study concentrates on the level of team, exploring team leader narcissism and its influence on team performance,which can provide some foreshadowing for subsequent in-depth study on team leader narcissism.