Abstract
New-generation employees wield substantial influence over an organization’s innovation capacity and long-term sustainability. This study examines data from 276 of such employees in Chinese family enterprises, delving into the impact of differential leadership on their innovation performance and the nuanced effects it entails. We investigate how employee self-efficacy molds the influence of leadership behavior. Our findings uncover that while differential leadership can augment the innovation performance of new-generation employees through enhanced job crafting, it can also hinder this performance by exacerbating job burnout. Employee self-efficacy emerges as pivotal, moderating the influence of differential leadership positively on job crafting and negatively on job burnout. Moreover, our study validates the moderating effect of employee self-efficacy on the mediating role of job crafting and job burnout. comprehension of the mechanisms and constraints of differential leadership within Chinese organizational frameworks. The insights gleaned offer practical guidance for enterprise managers looking to employ differential leadership styles to nurture the creativity of new-generation employees and uplift their innovation performance.
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The data, materials and code used to obtain the results in this paper are available from the first author and the correspond author by reasonable request.
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This research will not be possible without the contributions of all the co-authors, support of institutions, active role of participants, constructive feedback of reviewers, and editors. We are indebted to all the supporting members of this research.
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This research was funded by The National Natural Science Foundation of China, grant numbers 72072076&72372106, National Social Science Foundation of China, grant number 19BGL127.
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Zhang, Wu contributed to the conception of the study; Wu performed the experiment; Zhang contributed significantly to analysis and manuscript preparation; Zhang, Lu performed the data analyses and wrote the manuscript; Wu and Zhang helped perform the analysis with constructive discussions.
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Zhang, X., Wu, M. & Lu, J. Differential leadership and innovation performance of new generation employees: the moderating effect of self-efficacy. Curr Psychol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-024-05847-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-024-05847-3