The Impact Of Leader-follower Congruence In Creative Role Identity On Employees' Creative Behavior

How to promote more employee creative behavior,which refers to the generation of novel and practical ideas of employees in the workplace,is a timeless theme discussed by many academic scholars.It's because that employee creative behavior is the first stage of organizational innovation which further plays a crucial role for organizations to obtain and maintain competitive advantages in the dynamic economic environment.Leaders are important to followers' behavioral decisions as they are taking charge of employees' performance evaluation and the allocation of work-related resources as well.However,previous studies have mainly focus on the single role of leader when exploring the antecedents of employee creative behavior from a leader perspective,rather than considering the influence of the combination of leader and employees' characteristics.Fits between employees and their work environment have been stressed many years as shared values can improve employees' work efficiency and result in many positive outcomes,among which person-supervisor fit acts as a considerable role because of the tremendous influence of leaders in employees decision-making process.This study,therefore,explored the effect of leader-follower congruence in creative role identity,which refers to the extent individual identify himself or herself as a creative person,on employees' creative behavior.Furthermore,the mediating role of supervisor-subordinate guanxi between leader-follower congruence in creative role identity and employee creative behavior was discussed.Person-environment fit theory,social exchange theory,and signaling theory provided a theoretical lens for this study.Empirical research was conducted when hypotheses have been established in the guidance of the theories mentioned above.More specifically,250 leader-follower matched data from 56 groups were collected by a multi-source questionnaire.LISREL,SPSS and polynomial regression with response surface analysis were used to assess the sample information,descriptive statistics,reliability and validity,and correlations and to test hypotheses as well.Findings indicated that the congruence of creative role identity between leader and followers is positively related to employee creative behavior and supervisor-subordinate guanxi.Further,employees are likely to present more creative behavior when employees and the leader's creative role identity are both high rather than low.Additionally,difference is nonsignificant when comparing the effect of the two incongruent combinations on employee creative behavior.Results also confirmed that supervisor-subordinate guanxi relates positively to employee creative behavior and mediates the relationship between leader-follower congruence in creative role identity and employee creative behavior.Theoretical contributions,managerial implications,limitations and suggestions for future research are discussed in the end.