The Effect of Visionary Leadership on Researchers'Innovation Performance
The current development of science and technology is highly relevant to the contribution and innovation of research-ers,which has raised concerns on how to effectively improve the researchers'innovation performance.In a research team,the leader is responsible for both team management and research guidance,thus which has great significance on the performance of the research team.Previous studies have attempted to explain the relationship between leader behavior and researchers'innova-tion performance from multiple theoretical perspectives.However,these studies have overlooked that leaders play an import-ant role in helping researchers to set clear and specific goals in order to improve their innovation performance.When confront-ing with uncertainties in the research process,leaders are able to motivate researchers to strive for the right goals.Therefore,it is necessary to conduct further research on innovation incentives for researchers in order to enrich current findings.Drawing upon goal setting theory,this study explores the effect of visionary leadership on employee innovation perform-ance in research teams.It also examines the mediating role of employee goal clarity and the moderating role of leader-subor-dinate goal congruence in the theoretical model.To test the proposed hypotheses,this study conducted a multi-time and multi-source survey in a large research institute in China,and finally gathered the matched data from 61 leaders and 404 employees within research teams.The empirical data was analyzed by Mplus 7.0 software to conduct confirmatory factor analysis and multi-level path analysis,and by R 4.0.3 software to perform.Monte Carlo bootstrapping analysis with 20 000 iterations,in or-der to assess the significance of the indirect effects in our model.The results show that visionary leadership is positively related to employee innovation performance,and goal clarity me-diates the relationship between visionary leadership and employee innovation performance.Moreover,goal congruence between leaders and their employees positively moderates the indirect effect between visionary leadership and employee innov-ation performance via goal clarity.This mediation effect is much stronger when goal congruence is higher.The results examine the effectiveness of visionary leadership in the innovation incentives of researchers from the goal set-ting perspective.This study extends the current literature on the antecedents of researchers'innovation performance,and fur-ther sheds new light on how leaders can improve the innovation performance of their employees within research teams.Fur-thermore,it enriches the theoretical work on goal congruence as a boundary condition.The results of the study also have some practical implications on goal management and innovation motivation of researchers.
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