Research On The Influence Of Leadership Aspiration On Deviance

Leadership aspiration has long been regarded as the main predictor of career achievement,leadership status and promotion of employees,and has become the focus of organizational management and development.Existing literature mainly affirms the positive role of leadership aspiration as motivation for employees to work hard,but are soldiers who want to be generals necessarily good soldiers? With the deepening of the research on the transformation of positive behavior to negative behavior,psychological license theory becomes a new perspective to explain this mechanism.According to this theory,individuals who perform laudable acts can obtain psychological license to engage in negative acts without psychological burden,and “good soldiers”can also turn bad.Based on psychological license theory,this study explores the influence of leadership aspiration on employee deviance,and explains why and how “good soldiers” probably turn bad.To this end,this paper proposes a serial moderated mediation model of leadership aspiration affecting deviance.This study is based on a questionnaire survey which was conducted among 307 employees of a large state-owned enterprise.A total of 307 valid matching questionnaires were collected through two-point questionnaire distribution,SPSS,AMOS and MPLUS were used to process and analyze the data.The results are as follows:(1)Leadership aspiration positively affects employee voice.(2)Leadership aspiration affects employee deviance through the chain mediation between voice and psychological entitlement.Psychological entitlement plays a partially mediating role in the relationship between employee voice and deviance.(3)Leader humility moderates the relationship between leadership aspiration and employee voice,as well as the serial mediation path of “leadership aspiration → voice → psychological entitlement → deviance”.Corresponding suggestions are provided for the management of employees in practice:(1)To encourage and enhance the leadership aspiration of employees and develop their leadership.(2)In terms of employee leadership development and voice behavior,managers should strike a balance between employee motivation and management,avoiding the psychological entitlement which may cause.(3)To give full play to the role of humble leaders as role models and avoid their possible negative effects.This study has four theoretical contributions:(1)This paper explores the negative effects of leadership aspiration and expands research on leadership aspiration and deviance.(2)The psychological license theory is introduced to explore the influence of leadership aspiration on deviance,which responded to the call of previous studies for “in-depth exploration of the negative role of organizational citizenship behavior”,and enriches research on the conversion of positive behavior and negative behavior.(3)This study studies voice from the perspective of individual and expands the research perspective of voice behavior.(4)From the perspective of employees,this paper explores the moderating effect of leader humility on the influence of leadership aspiration on employee deviance,and expands relevant research on leader humility.