Research on the Affective Mechanism of Authorized Leaders' Influence on the Innovation Performance of Knowledge Workers

Abstract

In this paper, we have collected and processed 233 effective data of paired survey questionnaires for knowledge workers and their supervisors, and empirically studied the affective mechanism of authorized leaders' influence on the innovative performance of knowledge workers. The results show that authorized leadership can positively influence the positive emotion of knowledge workers; it has negative influence on the knowledge worker's negative emotion, and ultimately affects the knowledge worker's innovation performance. Meanwhile, the Leader-Member eXchange (LMX) plays a positive role in the positive relationship between the authorized leadership and the knowledge worker. It plays a negative moderating role in the negative affective relationship between the authorized leadership and the knowledge worker. On this basis, this paper posits that leaders need to manage the innovative behavior of knowledge workers by implementing the authoritative leadership style; meanwhile, the authorized leaders should have more and better communication and interaction with the knowledge workers, which will effectively promote the positive emotion of the knowledge workers by authorized leadership style. And also, to further on dissolve their negative emotion, and finally improve the knowledge-oriented staff's innovative performance, in order to give full play to the knowledge of staff in the role of enterprise innovation.

Keywords: Authorized leaders; Knowledge workers; Innovative performance; Trust mechanism