The Influence Of Senior Leader's Regulatory Focus On Leadership And Enterprise's Innovation Strategy

The report of the 19th CPC National Congress points out the importance of innovation and proposes that innovation is the key to China's development and the basis of China's economic system.Since innovation becomes the core strategy of the whole country,people turn their attention to the driving forces for innovation.In the macro perspective,reform is the source of innovation;in the micro perspective,innovation comes from the entrepreneurship,which is a complex psychology process.The upper echelon theory explains the process of leader's influence on the strategy of enterprise and proposes that the organization outcomes such as strategy and performance are the reflection of leader's psychology traits.Thus,it is important for leaders to figure out how their psychology traits affect organization outcomes.Recently,regulatory focus theory becomes the research hotspot and some scholars apply the theory to the field of strategy management.Regulatory focus theory explains how people approach goals and proposes two different regulatory systems called promotion focus and prevention focus,which have essential differences among demand status,motivation,behavior strategies and many other aspects.Some research has found that the regulatory focus of leader's would influence the organizational change,acquisition and other organizational decisions.On the basis of existed studies,our research discusses the influence of leader's regulatory focus on innovation strategy and the internal mechanism.Based on the upper echelon theory and regulatory focus theory,this paper uses the framework of "(leader's)psychological process—behavior intention-organizational outcome" to analyze the influence of leader's regulatory focus on innovation strategy and discuss the internal mechanism.The findings are:(1)the leader 's promotion focus has a positive effect on exploratory innovation,while prevention focus has a positive effect on exploitative innovation;(2)the leader's promotion focus is positively associated with transformational leadership,while prevention focus is positively associated with transactional leadership;(3)the relationship between promotion focus and exploratory innovation is mediated by transformational leadership,while the relationship between prevention focus and exploitative innovation is mediated by transactional leadership.In conclusion,this paper takes a new perspective to discuss the antecedent of innovation strategy and analyzes the influence of leader's psychological traits on innovation strategy.Besides,future research could enlarge the sample size and sample range to get more comprehensive data set and improve the quality of the research.