Research On The Relation Among Leader-Member Exchange (LMX), Team-Member Exchange (TMX) And Climate Of Innovation Within Teams

LMX has developed into be mature through more than 30 years. The point of lmx is the differentiation between leaders and members, that is, leaders will treat different members with different methods. Tmx is the extension of lmx in the team context. Today, the modern enterprises, which mostly focus on team-based management, pay much attention to core competitiveness of themselves. Every enterprise advocates some kinds of innovation including technical innovation, managerial innovation, brand innovation and so on, so that they create more spaces to improve themselves in the competitive environment. We know through the previous study that the creative behevior of members would be affected by the climate of innovation within teams. Therefore, how to improve the climate of innovation within teams would be a focus of the present research. This paper combines the two mature theroty (lmx and tmx) with the realistic problems faced by the modern enterprises, and poses a question:what are the relations among the three factors?Through the previous literature review on the related variables, this paper summarizes the theoretical development, concept, construct and measurement of lmx, tmx and climate of innovation, as well as the theoretical and empirical studies about the relationship among the three variables. The purpose, empirical model and hypotheses of this research are proposed based on the above summaries.The data collection of this paper is from diverse enterprises with team-based management, and totally the effective samples include 254 participants belonging to 66 teams. After testing the reliability, validity and data aggregation, all the empirical analyses are conducted at the team level, including correlation analysis, regression analysis. SPSS16.0 and LISREL8.7 are used to conduct the analyses, and finally the expected results are tested well as follows:(1) Both mean lmx and mean tmx have positive impacts on the climate of innovation within teams.(2) Mean lmx has a positive impact on mean tmx.(3) Mean tmx partially mediates the relation between mean lmx and climate of innovation within teams.(4) Lmx differentiation respectively moderates the relation between mean lmx and climate of innovation within teams, as well as the relation between mean lmx and mean tmx. Futhermore, the relation between mean lmx and mean tmx, as well as the relation between mean lmx and climate of innovation within teams will be stronger for high lmx differentiation teams than for low lmx differentiation teams.