Research On Influence Mechanism Of Transformational Leader On Employees' Learning Behaviors From Failures

Economic growth has been under tremendous pressure as China's economic development enters a new normal.The traditional development momentum dominated by factors and investment scales is waning,which also means that extensive growth mode is now unsustainable.Therefore,in order to enhance the quality and efficiency of China's economic development,it is especially urgent to rely on innovation to drive a new engine and foster new economic growth points.As basic units of social economy,enterprises are the main force of innovation,so stimulating their innovation vitality has become the key to achieve the innovation-driven development.However,innovation is a process of exploring of the unknown,whose essence makes enterprises always face uncertainty as well as risk during the innovation,and failure often occurs.Under this ground,how to learn from the failure of innovation effectively turns to be a common problem.Being the basic constituent unit of enterprises,employees are the behavior subjects of learning behavior from failure at the macro level of enterprises.So,it is destined to be things without foundation when discussing learning from failure without taking employees' behavior into account.Due to the risk and complexity of innovation,enterprises often carry out innovation activities in the form of teams,which makes employees participating in the innovation affected both by factors of their team and themselves.Therefore,comprehensive consideration of team and individual multi-faceted factors is needed to make the study be closer to the actual situation of enterprises,thus to promote employees to carry out learning from the failure activities effectively.Therefore,in the context of enterprise innovation failure,in order to promote employees to learn from failure effectively,leaders should take responsibilities on how to influence team and individual factors through their leadership behavior.It is also meaningful and valuable.Leadership theory has gradually taken its focus on integrating multiple perspectives.The transformational leadership is at the forefront of this topic(Cai Yahua,2013),Kark and Shamir(2002)divided transformational leadership behaviors into the following two types,one of which is focusing on the team level,while the other is focusing on the individual level.And after this division,study on relationship between dual-level transformational leadership and employee behavior has become one of the forefront issues both in the corporate and academic world.However,existing research has paid little attention to the relationship between dual-level transformational leadership and employees' learning behaviors from failures,neither the action mechanism between them.Based on the above background and in the context of innovation failure,this paper explores the formation mechanism of employees' learning behaviors from failures,on basis of social cognitive theory,leadership theory,perceived organizational support theory as well as organizational learning theory.Taking individual-focused transformational leadership-perceived organizational supportemployees' learning behaviors from failures,and transformational leadership team-focused-team psychological safety-employees' learning behaviors from failures as the two main lines,this paper has paid attention to the three issues including the influence of dual-level transformational leadership on employees' learning behaviors from failures at different levels,the mechanism of influence(the mediation role of perceived organizational support and team psychological safety)and the boundary conditions(the moderation effect of traditionality)in the influence process.Questionnaire survey method has been applied to obtain 478 valid questionnaires from 92 teams,and SPSS21.0,LISREL8.8 and HLM6.0 software have been adopted to analyze and empirically test the data.The main conclusions of this paper are as follows:(1)In the context of innovation failure,both individual-focused transformational leadership and team-focused transformational leadership have significant positive impact on employees' learning behaviors from failures;(2)Individual-focused transformational leadership has a significant positive impact on perceived organizational support.Perceived organizational support has a significant positive impact on employees' learning behaviors from failures.Organizational support plays a mediating role between individual-focused transformational leadership and employees' learning behaviors from failures;(3)Team-focused transformational leadership has a significant positive impact on the team psychological safety.Team psychological safety has a significant cross-level positive impact on employees' learning behaviors from failures,and it plays a mediating role between team-focused transformational leadership and team members behavior of learning form failure as well;(4)Traditionality has a negative moderation effect between individual-focused transformational leadership and employees' learning behaviors from failures,and it also has a negative moderation effect between perceived organizational support and employees' learning behaviors from failures.Based on the gap of existing theoretical research,this paper focuses on the hot topic of how to learn from the failures effectively,applying social cognitive theory,leadership theory,social exchange theory and organizational learning theory comprehensively.A conceptual model has been built up related to the impact mechanism that dual-level transformational leaders have on employees' learning behaviors from failures.Conclusions can enrich and improve the existing theoretical research Innovations are as follows:(1)The research has discussed the cross-level influence of transformational leadership on employees' learning behavior from failure by integrating leadership theory and organizational learning theory,which enriches study on transformational leadership and learning behavior from failure from different levels,and deepen the understanding of relationship between transformational leadership and employees' learning behavior from failure.This paper focuses on learning behaviors from failures at individual level.Process of the learning from failure behavior at individual level has been analyzed on basis of distinguishing the characteristics of learning from failure at three different levels of individual,team and organization,which has enriched the research on learning from failure at different levels.Dual-level transformational leadership and employee learning behavior from failure have been incorporated into a model together in this study,exploring the promoting role of transformational leadership plays in employee learning behavior from failure from different levels,thus to break through the limitations of existing research which puts focus only on single level.While enriching the multi-faceted research of leadership,this study also analyzes the impact of transformational leadership behavior on employee learning behavior from failure systematically and deeply.(2)Social information processing theory has been used to construct an influence mechanism model of transformational leadership on employee learning behavior from failure,and study on the formation mechanism of employee failure learning behavior has been deepened.Based on the leadership theory and social information processing theory have been integrated to construct an influence mechanism model of transformational leadership on employee learning behavior from failure in this study.The mechanism model provides a more systematic and in-depth explanation of the path through which transformational leadership has influence on employee learning behavior from failure,which helps to understand the formation process of employee learning from failure,and deepens research on the formation mechanism of employee learning behavior from failure.(3)Taking traditionality factor into consideration of the research framework,localization study of learning from failure has been promoted,and research on the effectiveness of transformational leadership also gets enriched.As representation of Chinese traditional culture,traditionality has been incorporated into the influence path,and after integrated with leadership behavior,employee psychological cognition and learning from failure behavior,it is shown that traditionality has negative moderating effect on relationships between individual focused transformational leadership and employee learning behavior from failure.such effect also appears between perceived organizational support and employee learning behavior from failure,and localization study of learning behavior from failure has been promoted effectively.Personal factors of employee-traditionality has been incorporated into the study of transformational leadership and employee learning behavior from failure,and boundary conditions in the influence process of the former on the latter,thus to enriching the study on effectiveness of transformational leadership.