The Impact Mechanism Of Paternalistic Leadership On Employees’ Creativity And Organizational Commitment In New Ventures

As the proposal of "public entrepreneurship, public innovation", new ventures has received extensive attention by scholars, but as we all know that most of new ventures have higher mortality rates and lower performance, in order to solve problems of survival and development of new ventures, so that how to enhance employee creativity and organizational commitment has become the core problems of the new ventures. It has been pointed out that leadership style is considered to be one of the most important factors which affect employees’creativity and organizational commitment. Paternalistic leadership is considered to be distinct from the western style of leadership and widely exists in China. However, few studies have studied on the relationship between paternalistic leadership and employees’ creativity/ organizational commitment in new ventures. This research builds an integrated conceptual model which illustrate the impact mechanism of paternalistic leadership on employees’ creativity and organizational commitment and their internal mechanism based on social exchange theory. This paper studies the direct impact of paternalistic leadership on employee creativity and organizational commitment, and then the mediating of impression management and the moderating of organizational-based self-esteem. What’s more, we did our empirical analysis based on 436 samples at last. The main research conclusions are as follows:(1) The results indicate that the relationship between benevolent leadership and employees’creativity is significantly positive, the relationship between authoritarian leadership and employees’creativity is significantly negative, but the relationship between moral leadership and employees’creativity is not significant.(2) The relationship between benevolent leadership and organizational commitment is significantly positive, and the relationship between moral leadership and organizational commitment is significantly positive, but the relationship between authoritarian leadership and organizational commitment is significantly negative.(3) Impression management plays a full mediating role in the relationship between benevolent leadership and employees’creativity, and plays a partial mediating role in the relationship between authoritarian leadership and employees’ creativity, while there is no mediating role between moral leadership and employees’creativity.(4) Impression management plays a partial mediating role in the relationship between benevolent leadership and organizational commitment, and plays a full mediating role in the relationship between authoritarian leadership and organizational commitment, while there is no mediating role between moral leadership and organizational commitment.(5) Organizational-based self-esteem has a significant moderating effect:When organizational-based self-esteem is higher, the positive relationship between benevolent leadership and impression management is stronger. When organizational-based self-esteem is higher, and the negative relationship between authoritarian leadership is stronger, but there is no moderating effect between moral leadership and impression management.The practical implication of this research is that there are differences among the relationship between benevolent leadership/moral leadership/authoritarian leadership and employees’ creativity/ organizational commitment. Therefore, leaders should adopt benevolent or moral leadership styles, and to avoid using authoritarian leadership style. Meanwhile, in the process of management, leaders should be concerned about the psychological characteristics of individual employees, so that they should use different management practices to improve their creativity and organizational commitment. Finally, we pointed out the existing limitation and the direction of the future research.