The Impact Mechanism Of Mentor’s Autonomy Support Leadership On The Graduate Students’ Creativity

Scientific and technological Innovation which is the fundamental forces in building the innovative country is increasingly promoted to the height of the core national development strategy. Graduate students who are the senior personnel in our high education are shouldering crucial role in scientific and technological Innovation..However, when compared with the developed Countries, administrators and scholars have showed that our graduate students lack core competitiveness and thus their creativity is at a disadvantage. Therefore, how to enhance the creativity of graduate students is become the key issue for Colleges and Universities. In our country, the mentor is responsibility of the graduate education and is the key leader in graduate students’ research, Basing on self-determined theory, this article study the mechanism of mentor’s autonomy support leadership on the graduate students ’creativity. We first analyzed the possible direct reasons that mentor’s autonomy support would promote students’ creativity, and then analyzed the indirect effects of autonomous motivation and creative self-efficacy. We also considered the moderating role of learning goal-orientation and gender on the relationship between mentor’s autonomy support and graduate students’ creativity. We did our empirical analysis based on 206 samples from research Universities to test the theoretical hypotheses.The main research conclusions are as follows:(1) We confirmed that mentor’s autonomy support is a predictor of graduate students’ creativity.(2) Our finding of a totally mediating role for autonomous motivation on the relationship between mentor’s autonomy support and graduate students’ creativity, suggests that, in mentor’s autonomy supportive, graduate students will enhance the intrinsic motivation and facilitate internalization of extrinsic motivation. This motivation will enhance creativity.(3) Our finding of a partial mediating role for creative self-efficacy on the relationship between mentor’s autonomy support and graduate students’ creativity, suggests that, in mentor’s autonomy supportive, graduate students will enhance the confidence in innovation. This confidence will enhance creativity.(4) We found that learning goal-orientation can positive moderate the relationship between mentor’s autonomy support and graduate students’ creativity. Suggests that, student’s higher learning goal-orientation, the relationship between mentor’s autonomy support and graduate students’ creativity are stronger. Also we found that gender can moderate the relationship between mentor’s autonomy support and graduate students’ creativity. Suggests that, Compared to male students, mentor’s autonomy support have a stronger positive effect on female students’ creativity.(5) Through the exploration of the direct relationship, mediating relationship and moderating relationship between autonomy support and creativity, we thought the impact mechanism is that autonomy support would directly promote creativity and also would cause the change of students psychological and autonomous motivation and creative self-efficacy which would promote creativity indirectly, and also the learning goal-orientation and gender would moderate the direct relationship.Originality of the study is that:Firstly, self-determined theory is originally in Western countries which is advocate autonomy. So whether this theory is suit for China which is full of traditional collective cultural is deserved to research. This paper based on self-determined theory to research the relationship between mentor’s autonomy support and graduate students’ creativity in China higher education. So this research show the reasonable of self-determined theory applied in China. Secondly, we explore the mechanism of mentor’s autonomy support leadership on the graduate students’ creativity. Thirdly, we considered the moderating role of learning goal-orientation and gender on the relationship between autonomy support and creativity.At last, we combine the research conclusions with the practical experience in higher education give advices about how to enhance graduate students’ creativity from the macro-level policy-making by education departments, universities and institutes, and the mentor.