A Study On The Effect Of Differences In Implicit Leadership Prototypes On Employees’ Thriving At Work

With the rapid development of the economy,the external environment is constantly changing,the workplace is becoming more and more stressful,and the complexity of employees’ work content has increased significantly.Under such circumstances,employees are more prone to burnout and find it difficult to achieve thriving at work,which is not good for personal physical and mental healthy development and organizational performance.Leaders adopt a variety of leadership behaviors in order to make more employees achieve thriving at work,but are the leaders’ actual behaviors really as effective as leaders think they are in directly affecting thriving at work? Research shows that leadership effectiveness is affected by differences in implicit leadership prototypes,i.e.,the difference between actual leadership behaviors perceived by employees and ideal leadership behaviors affects the effectiveness of leadership behaviors.Based on this,this paper attempts to investigate whether differences in implicit leadership prototypes affect employees’ thriving at work and explore the mechanisms of their effects.Based on the above background,this paper summarizes domestic and international literatures on implicit leadership prototypes,employee thriving at work,employee followership behavior,and leadership member exchange,combines social exchange theory and the social embedding model of thriving at work,explores the influence mechanism of the differences in implicit leadership prototypes on thriving at work,introduces employee followership behavior as a mediating variable and leadership member exchange as a moderating variable,and constructs a model with moderated mediating model.The data were collected through questionnaires,and a total of 436 valid questionnaires were collected.The data were analyzed by descriptive statistics,reliability analysis,and hypothesis testing through SPSS26.0 and AMOS22.0,and the empirical results verified the hypotheses of this paper.This led to the conclusion that:implicit leadership prototype differences negatively affect employees’ thriving at work;employee followership behavior plays a partially mediating role between the two;meanwhile,leadership member exchange plays a moderating role in the negative relationship between implicit leadership prototype differences and employee followership behavior,and the negative effect of implicit leadership prototype differences on employees’ followership behavior is mitigated when leadership member exchange is high quality.Based on this conclusion,this paper also proposes the following management suggestions: optimize the management style to reduce the implicit leadership prototype difference;create a learning atmosphere and build a learning organization to realize employees’ thriving at work;strengthen the humanistic care for employees and establish a high-quality leadership member exchange relationship;promote the transformation of employees into followers and value the value of following behavior.