Research On The Mechanism Of Paternalistic Leadership Affecting Team Creativity:The Mediating Effect Of Team Voice

In the context of Chinese collectivistic culture,the team creativity which refers to the ability of team members to generate creative ideas cooperatively,is the source of the current enterprises to achieve the goal of “innovation-driven development”.Leadership style which means the stable behavior pattern formed by leaders,is one of the key factors to stimulate and enhance the team creativity.The paternalistic leadership that originates from Chinese traditional culture has been widely found in various organizations of different countries,which has a profound impact on the team creativity of various cross-cultural organizations.Team voice is an extra-role speech act that links members of organizations.Under the context of “the rule by man” in traditional Chinese organizations,managers of paternalistic leadership styles may encourage employees to take voice behavior so that they can generate more creative ideas,or they may engage in the role of “lays down the law”,which makes team members keep silent and obsolete.On account of lack of research on the Chinese contextual leadership style in the field of team creativity,this study tests the mediating effect of team promotive/prohibitive voice through which three dimensions of paternalistic leadership,as well as the moderating role of team traditionality on the basis of implicit voice theory.Survey data for this study is collected with the collaboration of 24 manufacturing and service firms in Shaanxi and Sichuan provinces.In order to avoid common source bias,the data on different variables are collected from multiple sources.Team members report their collective perception about paternalistic leadership,team traditionality and team promotive/prohibitive voice.Team supervisors report basic team information and team creativity.Hierarchical regression is used to test the hypotheses about the direct effects and the mediating effects in this study.Edwards' nested equation path analysis is used to test hypotheses about the moderating role of team traditionality in the mediating effects of team promotive/prohibitive voice between paternalistic leadership and team creativity.The following results are obtained by the empirical study on 113 work teams' data:(1)benevolence leadership and moral leadership positively affect team creativity through increasing team promotive/prohibitive voice,while authoritarian leadership negatively influences team creativity through decreasing team promotive/inhibitive voice;(2)as team traditionality decreases to some extent,the indirect effect of authoritarian leadership on team creativity through team prohibitive voice becomes insignificant.Since cross-cultural communication research pays special attention to the influence of traditional culture in each country on the phenomenon of silence and voice,this study combines traditional Chinese Confucian culture to contribute to the study of silence and voice in the field of cross-cultural communication.