The Working Mechanism Of Humble Leadership's Impact On Creativity

At the key stage of economic transition,the creative problems solving of all organizations is increasingly based on teams with diverse resource,integrating varying knowledge and skill,and multiple plans and creativity.The knowledge sharing among team members plays a curial role in knowledge integration,while knowledge sharing is not easy to achieve due to all kinds of reasons.Then,how to improve knowledge sharing is a major task of the team leader.Previous studies on the impact of leadership almost adopt a perspective of top-to-bottom,which means managers lead the teams to accomplish goals via their own charisma or authority.While the superiority and self-enhancement of leaders would lead to negative impacts,as larger psychical distance between leader and subordinates.Especially,nowadays,post-80s and post-90s become as the major force in workplace,they are actively involved in the decision making.The old fashioned leadership would not work in this new environment,and need to be adjusted to the new human resource.This study introduces humble leadership,and adopts a perspective from bottom to top,explores how this new leadership improve the knowledge sharing among team members and the creativity of the whole team and all individuals.This study is focus on following questions:Do diverse dimensions of humble leadership have cross-level impacts on individual creativity?What is the working mechanism?What is the boundary condition for humble leadership to work?Dose individual creativity has cross-level effect on team creativity?Answers on these questions would contribute to develop leadership theory,knowledge management theory and creativity theory.Based on a review of existing literature,we summarize the construct content,dimensions,antecedents and consequences of relevant variables,and the emerging research trend.The proposals and theoretical model is based on the main logic:humble leadership-knowledge sharing-creativity,and the boundary condition is leadership identification and power distance.Firstly,we analyze the impact of three dimensions of humble leadership(manifested willingness to see the self accurately,appreciation of the subordinates' strengths and contributions,teachability)on the individual creativity.Then,we discuss the mediating role of knowledge sharing,and moderating role of leadership identification and power distance.At last,we analyze how individual creativity have a cross-level effect on team creativity.To test the theoretical model,we do an empirical survey.The pre-survey is on individual level,153 valid questionnaires are collected.We use amendment items,correlation analysis,explorative factor analysis and validness analysis to improve the original items,and finalize the questionnaires.The main survey collects 327 team-level valid responses.We do aggregation test,reliability test,validness test,common method variance test,normal distribution test,explorative and confirmatory factor analysis.All tests are passed,then we do hierarchical regression and Hierarchical Linear Modeling(HLM).Here are the conclusions:(1)humble leadership has positive impact on team creativity;(2)tow dimensions of humble leadership,appreciation of the subordinates' strengths and contributions and teachability have significant effect on individual creativity,manifested willingness to see the self accurately has does not positive impact on individual creativity;(3)knowledge sharing mediates the relationship between humble leadership and team/individual creativity;(4)leadership identification has positive moderating effect on the relationship between humble leadership and knowledge sharing;(5)power distance orientated has negative moderating role of two dimensions of humble leadership(manifested willingness to see the self accurately and teachability)and knowledge sharing,while does not moderate the relationship between appreciation of the subordinates'strengths and contributions and knowledge sharing;(6)individual creativity has positive cross-level effect on team creativity.Overall,this study explores the mechanism which new leadership can develop creativity.We test the theoretical model through empirical method,and the conclusions fill several research gaps.This paper may be innovative in three ways.First,the innovation on research perspective.Traditional studies are based on the view from top to bottom,while we introduce humble leadership which is from bottom to top.We discuss the characteristics of humble leadership,and test its working mechanism,boundary condition and its impact on team results,which enrich leadership theory.Second,we explores the new antecedent of creativity.Based on the team input-team process-team outcome model,we examine the mediating role of knowledge sharing,and the new path to improve creativity.We provide new explanations on knowledge sharing and enrich knowledge management theory.Three,we contribute to a multi-level theory of creativity through proposing lower level creativity matters for higher level creativity.Creativity is a systematic process rather than an independent activity.All levels are mutual influential and related.This conclusion extends our understandings on creativity and on creativity theory.