The Relationship between Leaders’ Long-Term Orientation and Employees’ Innovative Behaviors

ABSTRACT

Considering the real-world dilemma of leaders’ high long-term orientation and employees’ insufficient innovative behaviors in practice, this study systematically explored the relationship between leaders’ long-term orientation and employees’ innovative behaviors using challenge and threat appraisals as the mediating variables and promotion focus as the moderating variable. An empirical analysis was performed on 348 two-stage leader–employee matching questionnaires collected from emerging industries in China. Leaders’ long-term orientation was positively related to employees’ innovative behaviors overall, and had positive and negative indirect relationships with employees’ innovative behaviors via employees’ challenge and threat appraisals, respectively. Employees’ promotion focus positively moderated the relationship between leaders’ long-term orientation and employees’ challenge appraisal, negatively moderated the relationship between leaders’ long-term orientation and employees’ threat appraisals, and further moderated the mediating role of challenge or threat appraisal in the relationship between leaders’ long-term orientation and employees’ innovative behaviors. This study revealed the relationship between leaders’ long-term orientation on employees’ innovative behaviors and its boundaries. It expands theoretical research on leaders’ long-term orientation and employees’ innovative behaviors.

Plain Language Summary

This study demonstrates the importance of a comprehensive and dialectical view of leaders’ long-term orientation to enterprises and leaders. First, leaders’ long-term orientation is a positive leadership factor that drives employee innovation overall. Therefore, to obtain long-term development, companies should encourage their leaders to establish a broader time horizon. Thus, when leaders use long-term orientation to guide their work and subordinates, enterprises and leaders should foster strengths and circumvent weaknesses through various means. Second, findings of this study on leaders’ long-term orientation and the indirect relationship with employees’ innovative behaviors via employees’ challenge and threat appraisals caution enterprises of the challenges and obstacles inherent to leaders’ long-term orientation and offer suggestions on how to use them to their advantage. In summary, this study attempts to guide companies and leaders on how to maximize the positive effects of leaders’ long-term orientation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the grants from the National Social Science Foundation of China (18BGL135) and the Research Innovation Program for Postgraduate Students of Jiangsu Province (KYCX21_3432).