The Effect Of Authentic Leadership On Employee Exemplification

With the development of global economy,enterprises are facing greater opportunities and challenges.In order to obtain greater profits in the competitive market,enterprises need to show better performance,which prompts enterprises to put forward higher requirements and expectations for employees.On the other hand,with the increase of the employed population,the improvement of the education level and the improvement of the quality of employed people,employees need to make more efforts to survive and develop in the organization.In this context,some employees use impression management strategies to make themselves look hard,such as " slack overtime " and "I will not leave until the leader leaves".These unreal impression management behaviors will not only not bring profits to the organization,but also cause the waste of organizational resources and affect the evaluation and decision-making of the organization.Therefore,in this era of "involution",it is necessary to reduce the inauthentic impression management practices in organizations.Exemplification is a form of unreal impression management.Based on the theory of social information processing,and starting from the theoretical framework that leadership behavior affects employee impression management motive and then affects employee impression management strategy,this study proposes that authentic leaders can convey to employees the information that they expect employees to work truly and treat others sincerely through daily communication and interaction with employees.Thus,employees’ exaggerated self-enhancement motive(a kind of impression management motive)is suppressed,and employees’ exemplification are reduced.In addition,the boundary conditions of authentic leadership pathways are also discussed.This study proposes that high performance expectations of leaders can make employees pay more attention to and be sensitive to information from leaders by increasing the uncertainty and complexity of employees’ work situation,thus enhancing the inhibition effect of authentic leaders on employees’ exaggerated self-enhancement motive and reducing employees’ exemplification to a greater extent.This study obtained sample data by sending out electronic questionnaires.After analyzing the effective sample data of 299 participants,it is found that authentic leadership has a significant negative influence on employee exemplification,and exaggerated self-enhancement motive completely mediates the influence of authentic leadership on employee model strategy.Leader high performance expectation positively moderates the relationship between authentic leadership and employees’ exaggerated self-enhancement motive,and also positively moderates the mediating mechanism of authentic leadership--exaggerated self-enhancement motive--exemplification.This finding adds to the relevant research on the mechanism of authentic leadership in organizations and unreal impression management,and can also provide some management implications for organizations.Finally,the limitations of this study are summarized,and the future research is prospected.