Research On The Impact Mechanism Of Leadership With Both Kindness And Severity On Employee Innovation Performance: A Cross-level Mediation Mode

Due to today’s complex and changing internal and external environment,a single leadership style makes it difficult to balance the different needs within the organization.Ambidextrous leadership has been regarded as an important factor affecting employee innovation since it was put forward.There are abundant researches on ambidextrous leadership in western environment,but there are few researches on dual leadership model with local characteristics in China.The two dimensions of benevolence and authoritarianism are derived from China’s long history of paternalistic leadership,which can be called authoritarian-benevolent leadership.And when both benevolent and authoritative leadership styles are at the right level,this dual leadership model,which is rooted in Chinese culture,can be a positive factor in improving employee behavior and performance,therefore,this study will explore the impact of authoritarian-benevolent leadership on employee innovative performance.In addition,employees resilience as individual important features of resources to help employees to resist innovation risk to make a change to adapt to the environment,and important boundary conditions such as values(such as power distance orientation)should be taken into account when authoritarian-benevolent leadership plays an effective role,so this study will also introduce employee resilience and individual-level power distance orientation to explore the mediating role of employee resilience and the moderating role of power distance orientation.In the study 1,a meta-analysis of 40 studies(N = 12387)was conducted to find that authoritarian leadership has a significant negative correlation with employee innovative performance,and to clarify whether authoritarian leadership has a positive effect on employee innovation performance.Study 2 explores the multilevel influence of authoritarian-benevolent leadership on employee’ innovative performance in a Chinese cultural context by introducing the social exchange theory and resource conservation theory.The study used the Benevolent Leadership Scale,the Authoritarian Leadership Scale,the Psychological Resilience Scale and the Power Distance Orientation Scale to conduct a questionnaire survey on the work teams of several enterprises in Beijing,Qingdao,Jinan and Hefei.Analysis of data from 52 work teams and 403 employees using a Hierarchical Linear Model(HLM),the results of the study show that:(1)authoritarian-benevolent leadership has a significant positive impact on employee innovation performance;(2)employee resilience mediates the relationship between authoritarian-benevolent leadership and employee innovative performance;(3)power distance orientation negatively moderates the relationship between authoritarian-benevolent leadership and employee resilience,that is,the positive effect of authoritarian-benevolent leadership on employee resilience is significant under the condition of low power distance orientation.Based on The Social Exchange Theory(SET)and The Conservation of Resources Theory(COR),this study explores the influence mechanism of the Chinese characteristic dual leadership model(authoritarian-benevolent leadership)on employee innovative performance through two studies.Based on the above conclusions,this study finds a new way to improve employee innovative performance and provides some enlightenment and reference for enterprise management: Organizational leaders should adopt the dual leadership model of authoritarian-benevolent leadership,and it is necessary to pay attention to employees with low power distance orientation while exerting the effectiveness of authoritarian-benevolent leadership.Meanwhile,organizations should cultivate and develop employee resilience to improve employee innovative performance and maintain organizational core competitiveness.