A Meta-analysis On The Impact Of Authentic Leadership On Creativity Of Chinese Enterprises

With the global economic growth slowing down or even falling into recession,the external economic environment tends to be complex.Chinese enterprises facing transition pressure must actively seek change through constant innovation so as to maintain their competitive advantage in the international trade,which undoubtedly requires more on the leadership.How to promote organizational change and creativity are of increasing focus.Relevant theoretical studies show that authentic trait and role of leaders can remarkably enhance the quality of leader-member exchange,elevate employees' intrinsic motivation as well as psychological capital,which may help to creativity development.Many empirical studies have also shown that authentic leadership is positively correlated with organizational creativity.However,this result is still controversial due to the differences in research situation and sample.So,what is exactly the relationship between authentic leadership and creativity in Chinese context,is it positive or negative? To what extent is the correlation between the two? Are there any factors that regulate the relationship between them? Meanwhile,only a few studies have explored the mechanism of authentic leadership from multiple levels or based on a cross-level model,also making it very difficult to analyze the efficiency of such leadership more comprehensively.Based on the doubts above,we conducted a meta analysis aiming to quantitatively integrate results from domestic empirical literatures in recent ten years about the relationship between authentic leadership and individual creativity and group creativity.A 14367 sample included in 52 valid researches was quantitatively analyzed,through which this paper got some new comprehensive conclusions:(1)authentic leadership has positive correlation with individual creativity and group creativity;(2)the correlation between authentic leadership and creativity at group level is slightly higher than that in individual creativity.The study further explored the impact of changes in certain factors on the degree of relevance between authentic leadership and creativity.The findings are as follows:(3)the source of data,the type of research and publication all significantly regulate the relationship between the two in different levels;the measurement of authentic leadership and whether mediating variables exist have significant moderating effects on the individual-level relationship,but not on group level,the moderating effect of publishing year is not significant in both levels.At the end of this paper,we give some suggestions for management on how leaders can improve organizational creativity through mediating variables such as individual and contextual factors.Also,the conclusions and prospects of the study provide direction for the follow-up research on organizational creativity.