The Impact Of Servant Leadership On Employee Innovative Behavior

Confronted with unpredictable external environment and rapid technological change, the modern enterprises have always focused on how to gain everlasting competitive advantage in the increasingly severe competition. With the advent of the era of knowledge economy, the innovation has become the important source of core competitiveness for enterprises. As the main body of organization innovation, the individual innovative behaviors of the employee are of great value to team innovation, organizational innovation. Thus, the factors affecting innovative behaviors of the employee have become the focus of the academia and management practices. In the management practice of enterprise, many organizations and teams provide employees with a lot of tangible infrastructure such as money, equipment and so on, hoping to stimulate innovation enthusiasm and innovation behavior of employees by offering material incentives. However, universal innovation upsurge the enterprises expected appears to have a little effect. It is not difficult to find that is because the modern enterprises mostly ignore the role of intangible infrastructure such as the leader behavior, leader style, team innovation climate, team ethic climate, communication channels, in employee innovative behavior.Based on the research of scholars at home and abroad, the leader style of a team has important impact on employee innovative behavior. In the 1990s, the research of servant leadership has been carried out, western scholars have started to research the antecedent and consequence variables of the servant leadership, the study of servant leadership is still in the state of beginning. Ethical climate is generally defined as a psychological construct that is based on the aggregation of individual perceptions of what is ethical conduct in the organization or in the team. The effect of ethical climate on employees’ethical behavior is of vital importance. The previous studies of ethical climate mainly focused on the organizational level, the research of team level is still in the exploratory stage, the study of antecedent and consequence variables remains to be further expanded. This paper takes servant leadership as the independent variable, the employee’s innovation behavior as the dependent variable, and studies mediating effect of team ethic climate between the two. This paper uses the SPSS 17.0, AMOS20.0 and HLM6.0 to analyze the mechanism of servant leadership, the employee’s innovation behavior and team ethic climate, and use the hierarchical method to study the impact of team level variables mechanism on individual level variables.This research mainly draw the following conclusions:first, in Chinese context, the servant leadership, who plays a role model, has positive effects on innovative behaviors of the employee. Second, based on the analysis orientation of leadership style-organization situation-individual behaviors, this paper studies mediating effect of team ethic climate between the servant leadership and employee innovative behavior. Through the study, we found that care ethical climate and legal ethics climate play a partial intermediary role between servant leadership and innovation behavior of employees while ethics rules type climate plays a complete mediation role between servant leadership and innovation behavior of employees.In this paper, the research is carried out in Chinese context. It does not only have theoretical value, but also provides some enlightenment for our management practice. This paper puts forward the targeted management advice from the individual level, group level and organizational level. Those suggestions pay full attention to the effect of servant leadership style and team ethic climate on innovation behavior of the employees, and aim to gain lasting competitive advantage for enterprise development.