非伦理领导与员工创新越轨行为:多重中介效应分析

以资源保存理论和情感事件理论为理论基础,以316名员工为被试,运用非伦理领导、情绪耗竭、内在动机和创新越轨行为等量表,对非伦理领导通过情绪耗竭和内在动机两个中介变量影响员工职场创新越轨行为的作用机制进行了探讨。研究结果表明：（1）非伦理领导、情绪耗竭、内在动机和职场创新越轨行为彼此显著相关;（2）情绪耗竭和内在动机的链式多重中介效应在非伦理领导与员工职场创新越轨行为之间起完全中介作用,非伦理领导不但分别以情绪耗竭和内在动机两个独立中介变量影响员工职场创新越轨行为,还可以通过“非伦理领导→情绪耗竭→内在动机→创新越轨行为”的路径影响员工职场创新越轨行为。

Unethical leadership and employees’ creative deviance:An analysis of the multiple mediating effects

In organizational management practices, because of resource scarcity and other constraints, it is impossible for organizational leaders to support all employee innovations, and they often tend to retain new ideas that they believe are most practical and most likely to be realized. After the creative ideas are rejected by the superiors, the employees may follow the superior arrangement, cancel or reduce the innovation investment in the follow-up tasks, but it is also possible to violate the higher-level instructions and continue to increase the investment in the rejected ideas. Faced with the positive management philosophy and management measures of the superiors, when the proposed ideas are rejected by the superiors, it is very likely that the employee will not contradict the superior instructions on the one hand, and continue to practice the negative ideas in private on the other hand, it is the creative deviance. In line with this idea, if the superior leader who denies the employee's workplace initiative innovation is a passive leader, how will the employee's emotions be affected? Will this influence enhance or diminish the employee's subsequent innovation investment, which in turn affects the creative deviance? As a negative work situation, unethical leadership are likely to have a negative impact on employee workplace innovation behavior, because it is closely related to employee emotional exhaustion, and emotional exhaustion will harm the intrinsic motivation of employees' critical driving force in workplace innovation. Therefore, it is particularly important to explore the relationship between unethical leadership and employees’ creative deviance. In addition, the study also intends to explore the "black box" mechanism of unethical leadership affecting employees’ creative deviance. This study believes that intrinsic motivation will play an important mediating role in the impact of unethical leadership on employees’ creative deviance. However, although intrinsic motivation has theoretically been used as an mediating mechanism to link work scenarios with innovation capabilities, the results of previous studies on their mediating effects are inconsistent. Shalley et al. believe that the existence of other potential mediator variables may be a possible cause of inconsistent results. Therefore, emotional exhaustion is proposed as another mediating variable. It exists before intrinsic motivation. The emotional exhaustion caused by unethical leadership directly affects its intrinsic motivation, which in turn affects employees’ creative deviance.After the induction and review of the existing literature, this study is based on the current literature of conservation of resources theory and affective events theory. From the individual level of employees, considering the perspective of individual emotional exhaustion and intrinsic motivation, taking the unethical leadership - emotional exhaustion - intrinsic motivation - employees’ creative deviance as an idea, the study construct a conceptual model and propose research hypotheses. At the same time, the study draw on and refer to the relatively mature measurement tools at domestic and foreign, prepare the initial questionnaire, and through the small sample pretest, solicit expert advice from the industry, understand the true attitude of the sample participants and group discussion, adjust and improve the initial questionnaire. A formal questionnaire was eventually formed. After the questionnaire was formed, a questionnaire survey was conducted on employees of relevant enterprises in the developed coastal areas, and a total of 316 valid sample data were obtained. On the basis of relevant research at domestic and foreign, the reliability, validity analysis and common method deviation test of the data were carried out, and the verification variables and common method deviation test were carried out on the relevant variables by software such as AMOS, SPSS and Process. At last, the study discusses the mechanism of unethical leadership through the two mediators of emotional exhaustion and intrinsic motivation affecting the employees’ creative deviance.The empirical test results of this study show that after controlling demographic variables such as gender, education level, working years, and position and awareness time, the variables in this study (unethical leadership, emotional exhaustion, intrinsic motivation, and creative deviance) significantly related to each other. Among them, unethical leadership is significantly positively correlated with employee emotional exhaustion, and has a significant negative correlation with employee intrinsic motivation and workplace creative deviance; emotional exhaustion is significantly negatively correlated with employee intrinsic motivation and workplace creative deviance; employee intrinsic motivation and workplace creative deviance has a significantly positive correlation. The structural equation model (SEM) test results show that emotional exhaustion and intrinsic motivation play a chain of multiple mediations between unethical leadership and employees’ workplace creative deviance. On the one hand, the superior unethical leadership influences the employees’ workplace creative deviance by increasing emotional exhaustion and reducing the intrinsic motivation; on the other hand, the superior unethical leadership in turn stimulates the employee's emotional exhaustion, destroys the employee's intrinsic motivation, and indirectly affects the employees’ workplace creative deviance. It can be seen from the research results that in the daily organizational management practice, employees can actively intervene in the initiative innovation behavior from the perspective of superior leaders, help individuals actively reduce emotional resource consumption, enhance intrinsic motivation, and enhance innovative behavior and innovation performance.Our research contributes to existing literature in several ways. The development of this research continues the previous studies. On the one hand, we can further broaden the boundaries of relevant conceptual models by exploring the relationship between superior unethical leadership and employees’ workplace creative deviance, increase the empirical literature that is different from previous research; on the other hand, through the exploration of the mechanism of action between unethical leadership and employees’ workplace creative deviance, it provides more evidence and clues for follow-up research in this field, at the same time, it can also provide useful reference for the intervention and management of realistic workplace innovation.Our findings contribute to management revelation in several ways. First, from the source of the impact mechanism, organizations should strive to control or reduce unethical leadership behavior in the workplace as much as possible. Second, the organization should consider establishing relevant supporting mechanisms to intervene in the possible negative psychological state of employees. In addition, organizational managers must maximize their own business and leadership skills to more effectively manage employees in different mental states. Of course, the long-term and the key measure is to establish and develop a positive corporate culture, encouraging employees to help each other and preventing harming each other.