A Study About The Effect Of Humble Leadership On R&D Employee Creativity

As the main body of enterprise innovation,R&D employee plays an important role in the enterprise value creation and shaping the core competitiveness of enterprises.The value of R&D employee is often presented in the form of innovative ideas or innovative solutions,and they require a higher level of autonomy and self-fulfillment need in their work,which poses new challenges for managers.As a shaper of innovation atmosphere in the organization,how leaders adjust their own leadership to stimulate the internal motivation of employees and to improve their level of creation,and thus meet the needs of employees' growth,has become an important issue about enterprise sustainable development in the age of innovation.R&D employees are mainly engaged in creative work with complexity,risk and challenge,which requires leaders to abandon the traditional paternalistic and authoritative leadership,instead of supportive,equal,bottom-up open leadership behavior.As a new "bottom-up" supportive leadership style,humble leadership means that leaders take initiative to keep a low profile,acknowledge their own shortage and fault,appreciate the merits of employees and commend employees' contributions,listen employees' opinions and suggestions,and provide learning model to employees,which has become one of the latest hotspots in leadership research,but its effectiveness research is still relatively scarce.This paper explores the influencing mechanism of humble leadership on employee creativity,and further examines the mediating role of psychological capital and the moderating role of power distance based on the perspective of employees' self-psychological cognition.Based on survey data collected from 201 R&D employees,this paper uses structural equation model and hierarchical regression model to analyze the data.The results show that humble leadership is positively related to employee creativity;psychological capital plays full mediating role between humble leadership and employee creativity;power distance negatively moderates the relationship between humble leadership and employee creativity in such a way that the relationship is stronger for individuals lower than higher in power distance.The findings enrich effect mechanism of humble leadership and provide a new insight for leaders to implement down-top humble leadership behavior to promote employee creativity in the context of Chinese organizations.