The Antecedents Of Leader-member Exchange Differentiation And Its Impact On Employee Creativity

As modern companies seek to widen the heterogeneity of employees,the variety of team members has become an universal phenomenon.To manage the teams with high-level diversity effectively,team leaders tend to choose differentiated leadership.Based on members' ability,trustworthiness,and the contribution to teams,team leaders develop different qualities of leader-member exchange(LMX)with different members,and then allocate resources and tasks based on the LMX quality.By the behavior of LMX differentiation,team leaders could allocate team resources strategically,clarify the role of each member,motivate different members to work for team efficacy,and finally achieve management goals.However,LMX differentiation plays a "double-edged sword" role in developing employee creativity.On the one hand,high LMX differention enables capable members to acquire more resources,which could stimulate members' innovation motivation.While on the other hand,high LMX differentiation violates the principle of fairness,destroys team harmony,which would hinder the development of members'creative thinking.How to play the positive role of LMX differentiation on employee creativity and avoid its negative impact has been the focus of organizational managers and team leaders.Therefore,managers and leaders have to figure out the influencing mechanism of LMX differentiation on employee creativity,so that targeted actions could be taken to promote employee creativity.Further,they need to know how team diversity results in LMX differentiation,so that the level of LMX differentiation could be adjusted timely.The existing research has only provided limited guidance to the practice.Though there has been a lot of research on LMX differentiation,for the relationship between LMX differentiation and employee creativity,there has been limited research on the underlying paths and conditions,and the findings are inconsistent.Managers and leaders would experience plight when leveraging LMX differentiate to develop employee creativity.Moreover,the effect of team diversity on LMX differentiation lacks empirical evidence,and the contexts during the formation process of LMX differentiation need to be explored.Managers receive limited suggestions about how and when to adjust the level of LMX differentiation.To fill the research gaps and offer advices for better practice,by combing the leadership theories and the social information processing theory,the present study would conduct three sub-studies to explore how LMX differentiation forms and its influencing mechanism on employee creativity.The first sub-study aims to examine the formation mechanism of LMX differentiation.According to the situational leadership theory,employees' professional maturity is represented by professional ability,and the psychology maturity is represented by self-efficacy.This study tests how professional ability diversity and self-efficacy diversity within the team influence LMX differentiation.Moreover,considering the impact of internal and external team characteristics on leaders'behaviors,this study further explores the moderating roles of inter-team competition and team cohesion in the formation process of LMX differentiation.The second sub-study seeks to investigate when LMX differentiation plays an impact on employee creativity.Based on the path-goal theory,the impact of LMX differentiation on employee creativity would be moderated by the personal features,especially employees'cultural values.This study choses employees'collectivism and power distance orientation,which are two of the most vital cultural values,to examine their moderating effects on the relationship between LMX differentiation and employee creativity.The third sub-study sets goal to explore how LMX differentiation affects employee creativity.LMX differentiation may affect employee creativity through positive and negative paths simultaneously.According to the social information processing theory,this study investigates the positive and negative paths,which are enhancing employees' intrinsic motivation and weakening employees' perceived leader morality,to explain how LMX differentiation influences employee creativity.Besides,the effect of LMX differentiation depends on contexts.Focusing on the organizational characters,specifically,the human resource practice,this study further considers employees' perceived high-performance human resource practices as the context of LMX differentiation.To examine the three sub-studies,the present study collects data by carrying out questionnaire survey in 179 teams from 55 enterprises.The multiple regression,hierarchical linear model,multilevel moderation and multilevel mediation testing methods are combined to verify the research models.The main conclusions include:(1)The professional ability diversity and the self-efficacy diversity within the team both have significantly positive effects on LMX differentiation.The inter-team competition strengthens the relationship between professional ability diversity and LMX differentiation,while team cohesion weakens the impact of self-efficacy diversity on LMX differentiation.(2)Employees'collectivism and power distance orientation both positively moderate the relationship between LMX differentiation and employee creativity.Specifically,for the employees with high collectivism or high power distance orientation,LMX differentiation is significantly and positively related to their creativity;while for the employees with low collectivism or low power distance orientation,LMX differentiation has no significant impact on their creativity.(3)LMX differentiation is positively related to employees'intrinsic motivation and negatively related to employees'perceived leader morality.Employees' intrinsic motivation and perceived leader morality both have positive impacts on employee creativity.Moreover,when employees perceive high-level high-performance human resource practices,the positive effect of LMX differentiation would be stronger and its negative effect would be weaker.The present study contributes to the literature in the following ways:(1)By exploring how employee diversity affects LMX differentiation within different outside-team and in-team environments,this study enriches the research on the antecedents of LMX differentiation and the related contexts.(2)By examining the moderating roles of employees' collectivism orientation,power distance orientation,and the perceived high-performance human resource practices,this study expands the knowledge about the contexts of the relationship between LMX differentiation and employee creativity,as well as provides one possible explanation for the previous inconsistent results of this relationship.(3)By testing the positive and the negative paths from LMX differentiation to employee creativity simultaneously,this study helps figure out the underlying mechanism of the relationship between LMX differentiation and employee creativity,and also gives another possible explanation for the inconsistent findings.Moreover,the present study also provide management suggestions to organization managers and team leaders as follows:(1)They should pay attention to the significant role of LMX differentiation for developing employee creativity,be aware of the "double-edged sword" effects of LMX differentiation,seek its advantages and avoiding its disadvantages.(2)They are supposed to try to improve employees' intrinsic motivation and perceived leader morality,so as to make full use of their positive effect in promoting employee creativity.(3)They should match employees' high collectivism and power distance orientation with LMX differentiaiton,improve the perceived high-performance human resource practices of employees,thus create favorable contexts for LMX differentiation to improve employee creativity.(4)They can adjust the level of LMX differentiation by manipulating professional ability diversity,self-efficacy diversity,inter-team competition,and team cohesion.By doing these,team leaders could promote the level of LMX differentiation when the contexts are favorable for LMX differentiation to play an active role,and can reduce the level of LMX differentiation under the unfavorable contexts.