PurposeWith the rapid development of the service industry, service innovation has gradually become a hot topic in business today. How to further improve employees' service innovative behaviors has become critical to organizations' survival and success. Servant leadership, as a leadership style characterized by serving others, is closely related to employees' service innovative behaviors. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to develop a theoretical framework to examine the influence of servant leadership on employees' service innovative behavior, the mediating role of intrinsic motivation and the moderating role of identification with the leader.Design/methodology/approachTo test the theoretical model, a multi-time survey method was used to collect data from 381employees from a large high-tech company in Mainland China.FindingsThe results confirm that servant leadership can promote employees' service innovative behavior and intrinsic motivation. Meanwhile, employees' intrinsic motivation partly mediates the influence of servant leadership on their service innovative behavior. Moreover, this mediating relationship is conditional on the moderating role of individual identification with the leader in the path from servant leadership to individual intrinsic motivation.Research limitations/implicationsThe key limitation of this study lies in the representativeness of sample data, which is the convenience of non-probability sampling and self-reported data only from a large high-tech company in China.Practical implicationsThis study not only further verified a promotion factor of individual service innovative behavior from the perspective of leader influence, but also enriched the understanding of the positive influence of servant leadership on employees.Originality/valueThis study is the first to examine the relationships among servant leadership, employees' intrinsic motivation, identification with the leader and service innovative behavior. The results may help to open the “black box” of the relationship between servant leadership and employees' service innovative behavior by introducing their intrinsic motivation. The conclusions also indicate employees' identification with the leader is an important boundary condition among their relationships. Particularly, it not only moderates the relationship between servant leadership and intrinsic motivation, but also moderates the mediating role of intrinsic motivation.

The virtual display of products in e-commerce brings new problems of information asymmetry, and the overload of digital information also increases the difficulty of consumers' purchasing decisions. The real-time interaction between the streamer and the consumer during live streaming e-commerce will promote consumers' understanding of the product, reduce information asymmetry, and increase consumers' purchase intention. However, why do people trust the untouchable and unfamiliar streamers from live streaming e-commerce to purchase online? To understand this phenomenon, based on the perspective of the information asymmetry theory and parasocial relationship theory, this research identified how social capital affected purchase intention in live streaming e-commerce. Through a questionnaire survey of live viewers, the purchase intention model constructed by empirical testing was used. The findings showed that the streamer's professionalism, the reciprocal expectation of live streaming, and the viewer's parasocial relationship could effectively increase the viewer's purchase intention. The occurrence of a streamer's negative public events could significantly reduce the viewer's purchase intention. The scale of live streaming and the streamer's commitment had no significant impact on the viewer's purchase intention. Trust played an intermediary role between the streamer's professionalism and parasocial relationship and the viewer's purchase intention.

PurposeThe study aims to empirically study the effect of venture capital on open innovation of China's enterprises.Design/methodology/approachThis paper selects China's A-share listed companies on the small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) board and the Growth Enterprise Market from 2014 to 2018 as research samples to empirically study the effect of venture capital on open innovation of China's enterprises.FindingsThe authors find that venture capital can significantly promote open innovation of enterprises. This promoting effect is more significant when the venture capital institutions have profounder industry experience, higher shareholding ratio and are syndicated. Further research finds that venture capital mainly promotes open innovation through three mechanisms: increasing monetary funds, improving absorptive capacity and strengthening executive incentives, and the effect of venture capital on open innovation is significantly different under the conditions of different regions, industries and property rights.Originality/valueThis paper not only reveals the effect of venture capital on enterprises' open innovation and the specific mechanism, but also provides empirical evidence for emerging economies to build a national innovation ecosystem and make use of capital markets to accelerate innovation strategies.

This study uses organizational support theory and broaden-and-build theory to examine the antecedents and consequences of workplace gratitude. Specifically, we explored the moderating role of job satisfaction and the mediating role of gratitude at work, including team error management climate as a predictor and OCBs and creativity as outcome variables. Using multiphase, multisource, and multilevel data of 229 employees from 33 teams of two architectural companies located in the east of China, we found that team error management climate is conducive to enhancing employees' workplace gratitude, and that increased workplace gratitude then stimulates more organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) and creativity among employees. The positive effect of team error management climate on workplace gratitude and the indirect effect of team error management climate on OCBs and creativity are stronger for employees with lower job satisfaction. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings for managing employees' gratitude in the workplace.