Leader Behavior、Organizational Climate For Innovation And Innovation Performance:Empirical Study Based On HI-TECT SMEs

Under the background of building China as a country of innovation, innovative activities are becoming the motivation and the driving force of the nation economic. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) made a significant contribution to promoting China’s economic development depending on their unique innovation of technology and management, and promote China’s international competitiveness in areas like microelectronic technology, biomedicine, advanced manufacturing, new energy and materials, high-tech fields, or the emerging technical services in information consulting, modern logistics. Practice shows that, to maintain innovation capability and competition advantage, SMEs require not just need essential materials, human resources but also need a climate encouraging innovations, and setting up such a climate has a tight relationship with leadership behaviors. Therefore, this paper selected high technology SMEs as research objective, and deeply studied the relationship between leadership behaviors and innovation performance.First of all, this paper builds the model of influence of leadership behaviors on innovation performance based on literatures and theoretic analysis. The model consists of two main parts:one is the impacts of different leadership behaviors and all their dimensions on innovation performance and setting up a climate encouraging innovation; another one is the mechanism of leadership behaviors’influence on innovation performance, the direct impact of two different leadership behaviors on innovation performance, the mediation of innovation climate between leadership behaviors and innovation performance. Secondly, to prove the model and hypotheses, the author did a case study on a technology SME in Hunan province. Thirdly, the author revised the pilots’scales through preliminary investigation and made the questionnaires. At last, this paper uses SPSS17.0and AMOS17.0for descriptive statistical analysis, Cronbach’s a reliability analysis, exploratory factor analysis and confirmation factor analysis. Then it uses the structural equation model to test the validity of the conceptual model and the significance on each hypothesis.The empirical results show that:(1) Leadership behaviors of technology SMEs (Transformational/transactional leadership behavior) have significant positive impact on the innovation climate of organizations. Different dimensions of leadership behavior have slightly different impacts on the innovation climate. Positive Exception Management has the most significant impact; all four dimensions of transformational leadership behavior have significant impact.(2)Leadership behaviors of technology SMEs (Transformational/transactional leadership behavior) have significant positive impact on innovation performance. Transformational leadership behavior has direct influence on innovation performance while transactional leadership behavior has indirect influence on it.(3) Technology SMEs organizational innovation climate can promote the innovation performance of enterprises significantly, especially the encouraging level dimension in the innovation climate. The challenging jobs dimension and the work autonomy dimension have relatively small impacts on innovation performance.(4) Technology SMEs’innovation climate act as the partially mediation between transformational leadership and innovation performance, but act as the complete mediation between transactional leadership behavior and innovation performance.Finally, based on the empirical analysis, this paper puts forward some proposals and suggestions in order to break the limit of this study for future research.