Influence of Ethical Leadership on Employees’ Innovative Behavior: The Role of Organization-Based Self-Esteem and Flexible Human Resource Management

Abstract

Employees’ innovative behavior is a vital source for promoting the sustainable survival and development of enterprises. Innovation is a complicated and high-risk mental process, where in each stage employees’ innovative attitude and behavior will be affected by the varying behaviors of their direct leaders. Therefore, exploring the intricate relationship between leadership behavior and employees’ innovative behavior is necessary. Based on social exchange theory, this study builds a cross-level moderation model to investigate the impact of ethical leadership on employees’ innovative behavior and the mediating role of organization-based self-esteem and the moderating role of flexible human resource management. On the basis of a questionnaire survey of 146 supervisors and 365 subordinates in the mainland of China, the empirical results show that: (a) Ethical leadership positively affects employees’ innovative behavior significantly; (b) Organization-based self-esteem has a partial mediating relationship between ethical leadership and employees’ innovative behavior; and (c) flexible human resource management plays a positive moderating role in the relationship between organization-based self-esteem and employees’ innovative behavior, and it also positively moderates the mediating effect of organization-based self-esteem on the relationship between ethical leadership and employees’ innovative behavior. The findings reveal the internal mechanism and boundary condition of ethical leadership influencing employees’ innovative behavior, which provide a reference for enterprises to encourage employees to innovate, and have important practical significance for employees to actively pursue innovative activities in the workplace.

The Influence of Self-Efficacy on Job Performance of Employees in the Online Retail Sector in Malaysia – The Mediating Effect of Innovative Behaviour

“…The innovative behavior intervention that employees were willing to adopt in their undertakings leads to enhanced job performance. This is parallel to the study conducted by (Wen et al, 2021;Vitapamoorthy et al, 2021;Natorina, 2019;Suryani et al, 2019;van Zyl et al, 2019).…”

“…The study on the mediating effect of innovative behaviour is still at the infancy stages. According to (Wen et al, 2021;Vitapamoorthy et al, 2021;Bos-Nehles et al, 2017;Ali & Buang, 2011), the study on the impact of innovative behaviour and as an intervening factor has been the aim of many scholars, and it is still in its early stages. Besides, innovative behaviour is crucial for the sustainable development of online retailers, which leads to better employee and organisational performance according to (Natorina, 2019;Baird, 2018;Parviainen et al, 2017).…”

Re-Engineering the Human Resource Strategies Amid and Post-Pandemic Crisis: Probing into the Moderated Mediation Model of the High-Performance Work Practices and Employee's Outcomes

“…Self-esteem represents the self-concept of individuals, which plays a vital role in the lives of everyone, affecting psychological, physical well-being, enthusiasm, and life satisfaction (Cameron and Granger, 2019). In addition, earlier studies revealed that OBSE engenders many positive outcomes, i.e., stress management (Costantini et al, 2019), individual performance (Hahn and Mathews, 2018) and organizational citizenship behaviors (Kim and Beehr, 2018a), and innovative behaviors (Ali, 2021;Wen et al, 2021). Moreover, OBSE reduces uncertainty (Neves et al, 2020), as individuals having OBSE can handle stressful situations effectively (Costantini et al, 2019).…”

Internationalization Issues in Chinese Firms: One Belt, One Road-Based Perspective

“…Human resource management practices describe the management methods that enable firms to obtain valuable and outstanding information, as well as impact creative activity and greater performance ( Cao et al, 2021 ). HRM impacts workers’ job-related attitudes, talents, and behaviors in order to achieve an organization’s goals, and it plays a crucial role in creating an atmosphere that is conducive to knowledge management and innovation ( Wen et al, 2021 ). Because knowledge and innovation have origins in human psychology, numerous previous studies have recommended adopting HRM strategies to better encourage the development and dissemination of knowledge for improved organizational innovation performance ( Than et al, 2021 ).…”