The Influencing Mechanisms Of Authoritarian Leadership And Collectivism On Employee Creativity In The Public Sector

In today's rapidly changing and increasingly competitive work environment,employees in Chinese public sector are more than ever expected to produce novel and useful ideas about new products,services and procedures(i.e.,creativity).Employee creativity is so important not only because it improves standards of service and better meets customer needs,but also because it plays a crucial role in organizational success and survival.As a result,promoting employee creativity has become an urgent task for the public sector.Among many influencing factors,leadership and cultural values have been considered as two important factors.Therefore,the current study aims to explore the influencing mechanisms of authoritarian leadership and collectivism on employee creativity because they are prevailing and representative in Chinese society and organizations in the context of Chinese public sector.Further,this study will also examine the interaction effects of authoritarian leadership and collectivism on employee creativity based on culture self-representation theory.Our research mainly includes three sub-questions:1)the influencing mechanisms of authoritarian leadership on employee creativity;2)the influencing mechanisms of collectivism on employee creativity;3)the interaction effects of authoritarian leadership and collectivism on employee creativity.First,we conduct literature review on the key constructs.Second,we introduce the process of research design and data collection in detail.Then,we analyze the included sample and test our hypotheses by using SPSS and LISREL.Finally,we discuss the results in depth,and clarify the theoretical and practical implications of our findings.The conclusions of this study mainly include:1)We investigate the effect of authoritarian leadership on employee creativity in the context of Chinese public sector.Meanwhile,we examine the mediating role of creative role identity in the relationship between authoritarian leadership on employee creativity as well as the moderating role of benevolent leadership and moral leadership.We find that authoritarian leadership has negative relationship with employee creativity.Based on culture self-representation theory,we find that creative role identity would partially mediate the negative relationship between authoritarian leadership style and employee creativity.Further,the results suggest that the relationships between authoritarian leadership,creative role identity and employee creativity are moderated by benevolent leadership such that the negative relationships are stronger with high benevolent leadership and weaker with low benevolent leadership,which are inconsistent with our hypotheses.Besides,the moderating role of moral leadership is not significant.2)We explore the effect of collectivism on employee creativity as well as the mediating role of team identification and the moderating role of leader-member exchange(LMX)in the context of Chinese public sector.Results indicate that collectivism is positively related to employee creativity in Chinese public sector context.Further,we find that employees' team identification partially mediated the relationship between collectivism and creativity,and that this mediating relationship had conditional effects on the moderator variable LMX.3)We investigate the interaction effects of authoritarian leadership and collectivism on employee creativity,and the mediating role of creative self-efficacy in the context of Chinese public sector.We find that creative self-efficacy mediates the relationship between authoritarian leadership and employee creativity.In addition,the interaction of authoritarian leadership and collectivism is negatively related to creative self-efficacy and employee creativity.The findings have several theoretical implications.First,in the context of Chinese public sector,the findings not only expand the research on the influencing mechanisms of leadership on employee creativity,but also support that authoritarian leadership is an antecedent of employee creativity,thereby enriching the research area of authoritarian leadership.Second,the findings not only enrich the literature on the influencing mechanisms of cultural values on employee creativity,but also support that collectivism is an important antecedent of employee creativity,thereby enriching the research area of collectivism.Finally,the findings not only present a greater understanding of the role of culture self-representation theory in creativity domain,but also enrich the influencing mechanisms of authoritarian leadership on employee creativity.Apart from its theoretical implications,our study has several important managerial implications.For example,organizations should pay more attention to the leader's authoritarian leadership.Given that authoritarian leadership is an important factor that affects employee creativity,organizations should try to avoid leaders with high levels of authoritarian leadership.Meanwhile,the cultivation and the training of leaders should also be strengthened.For example,internal training should be adopted to improve the behaviors of those managers who have demonstrated as an authoritarian leader,thus improving the creativity of employees.In addition,leaders can also reduce authoritarian behaviors through corresponding behaviors,such as strengthening communication with employees by empowering them,thereby promoting their creativity.Further,enterprise managers should also pay attention to the evaluation of employees' cultural values and try to avoid putting employees with high levels of collectivism under the management of authoritarian leadership.