Research On The Effects Of Inclusive Leadership On Subordinates’ Followership Behavior

The increasingly complex diversity of gender,ethnic group and culture in organizational environment has become an important issue that leaders cannot avoid,with more researches turning to focus on integrating diversity to play its potential value,resulting in emergence of inclusive leadership.Inclusive leadership is described as openness,accessibility,and availability that leaders enact when interacting with subordinates,which has become an important topic in the field of organizational management in recent years.Leadership effectiveness needs to be based on the value orientation and behavior of subordinates in that there is no leadership without followers and followership behavior.The social identity theory has been widely employed to explain how leadership exerts influence,pointing out that whether followers identifying with their group identity plays an important role in construction of leadership.It has been confirmed by many studies that leaders can achieve group goals by shaping and increasing the identification of group members.Based on social identity theory,the current thesis answers four main questions to explain the relationship between inclusive leadership and followership behavior:(1)whether inclusive leadership promotes the followership behavior of subordinates;(2)whether relational identification with leaders and organizational identification mediate such relationship;(3)as two different types of identification in an organization,what interrelationship between relational identification and organizational identification is,in the process of playing their mediation role;and(4)in the context of Chinese organizations,what mediating role power distance plays.Based on a systematic review of reserch relating inclusive leadership,relational identification,organizational identification,followship behavior,and power distance,and theories of relational leadership,social identity and social exchange,the current thesis constructs a conceptual model and suggests research hypotheses.By analyzing the reliability and validity of data collected from the small sample pre-survey,a formal questionnaire was formed after deleting the unqualified items,followed by the formal survey collecting 419 valid questionnaires at three different time points.The data quality of the formal questionnaire was tested for normality,common method bias,reliability,and validity.By statistical softwares of SPSS 26.0 and PROCESS 3.0,and by employing the stepwise regression analysis,it is found that: inclusive leadership has a positive impact on followership behavior,with relational identification and organizational identification mediating such relationship respectively,and successively having a continuous mediating role,whereas the mediating effect of relational identification far greater than that of organizational identification;relational identification fully mediates the relation of inclusive leadership to organizational identification,which,meanwhile,results in a nonsignificant negative impact of inclusive leadership on organizational identification.Power distance positively moderates the relationship between inclusive leadership and followership behavior,i.e.,inclusive leadership has a stronger positive impact on followers with high power distance compared with those with low power distance.The thesis suggests that enterprises should pay attention to the cultivation of inclusive leadership behavior and working methods of managers,encouraging them to fully use the openness,accessibility and relability of inclusive leadership,to infect and stimulate employees’ work enthusiasm by positive attitude and emotion.Managers should also strive to improve the relational identificatioin and organizational identification of employees in their daily work,increasing their trust in managers,and enabling them to actively participate in decision-making and implementation,to fully mobilize and motivate employees’ followship behavior.The innovation of this thesis mainly includes three aspects:(1)It expands the relationship mechanism between inclusive leadership and followership behavior,on basis of the existing research on the mediation role of organizational identification,proposing that relational identification and organizational identification play as mediators respectively,and the continuous mediators in turn,which further explains and enriches the transmission path of inclusive leadership to exert influence on subordinates’ followership behavior with identification as the link.(2)It reveals that relational identification plays a more important mediator than organizational identification does.In the process of continuous mediation of relational identification and organizational identification,the mediating effect of the former is much greater than the latter.Meanwhile,relational identification completely mediates between inclusive leadership and organizational identification,leading to the negative direct impact of inclusive leadership on organizational identification,which is different from the conclusion of existing studies that inclusive leadership has a positive direct impact on organizational identification,indicating that relational identification may have a "double-edged sword" effect.(3)It is proposed that power distance positively moderates the relationship between inclusive leadership and followership behavior,which is different from the explanation of the negative moderation in the Western cultural context.Starting from the interactive characteristics of the "interpersonal orientation" between leaders and followers in the Chinese cultural context,the thesis provides more analytical perspectives for explaining the contingency of power distance in different cultural contexts.