Can Inclusive Leadership Improve Employee's Job Engagement

To cope with the complex and changeable economic situation, enterprises need more effective leadership than before. Effective leadership can give full play to the value of each employee, improve organizational performance. As a new effective type of leadership,inclusive leadership has received much attention in the field of leadership. Due to most empirical studies on inclusive leadership in Western cultural context, it is necessary to empirically test the effectiveness of inclusive leadership in Chinese culture context. By using data from 665 employees in 95 Chinese enterprises, this study investigated the effect of inclusive leadership on employee engagement, organization identification's mediation and balanced reciprocity's moderation. The results showed that: (1) Inclusive leadership has a positive effect on job engagement. (2) Organizational identification mediates the positive relationship between inclusive leadership and job engagement. (3) Balanced reciprocity positively moderates the relationship between organizational identification and job engagement, which is stronger when balanced reciprocity is high rather than low. (4) Balanced reciprocity positively moderates the mediating role of organizational identification in the relationship between inclusive leadership and job engagement. That is, the higher the balanced reciprocity is, the stronger the mediating role of organizational identification. Finally, the conclusion has important practical significance for enterprises. Enterprises should make the leader open and inclusive, respect for the needs of employees, to maintain the high sense of organizational identification and improve employee's job engagement.There are two innovations in this paper: First, this article examined the effectiveness of the inclusive leadership style in the context of China's management. With the gradual deepening of the degree of social diversity, inclusive leadership can provide a showcase of talent for each employee. The validity test of inclusive leadership in China's management situation would be very useful to promoting the practice of Chinese enterprises. Second, the balance of reciprocity in the Chinese society has a particular sense and is associated with Chinese social culture. It contains the Chinese people's unique understanding of it. This paper confirms that the balance of reciprocity as a Chinese cultural factor, has a regulatory effect,and this paper provides a new perspective for the study of Chinese situational research.