Does Moral Leadership Enhance Employee Creativity? Employee Identification with Leader and Leader–Member Exchange (LMX) in the Chinese Context

The paper analyses the relationship between employee creativity and moral leadership by exploring the impact of employee identification with leader and leader-member exchange (LMX) for enhancing creativity of the employee in the Chinese context. The research concludes that the concept of the positive relationship between moral leadership and the employee creativity is supported by the theory of collectivism and Confucianism.

Running head: ARTICLE SUMMARY
ARTICLE SUMMARY
Does Moral Leadership Enhance Employee Creativity? Employee
Identification with Leader and Leader–Member Exchange (LMX)
in the Chinese Context
Name of the Student:
Name of the University:
Author Note:

1ARTICLE SUMMARY
The purpose of this paper is to analyse the relationship between the employee creativity
and moral leadership by exploring the impact of employee identification with leader and leader-
member exchange (LMX) for enhancing creativity of the employee in the Chinese context. The
paper deals with stating hypothesis, variable analyses and drawing conclusions based on the
outcome. The entire research is enriched with the insightful knowledge of Anne S. Tsui.
It is essentially challenging for any organization to help the employees develop their
creativities to continue the sustainable state in the global competitive market. The introduction of
employee creativity is done by building the primary leadership qualities within the employee.
Moreover, the identification of the employee with the leader influences the LMX that leads to
creativity of the organization (Harwiki, 2013).
The creativity can be defined as the function of expertise, motivation, and skill of
creative-thinking. The business organizations in China follow Paternalistic leadership style that
account for building the framework for authoritarianism, moral integrity and compassion.
Seven hypotheses have been drawn regarding the relationship between the moral
leadership, employee creativity, and conciliation of employee identification. The research
proceeds through the data collection using primary data collection procedure from eastern China
(Li, Zhao & Begley, 2015). On the basis of the collected data, LMX and employee creativity
being categorical variables, are measured on a five-point scale where 1 represents strong
disagreement and 5 indicates strong agreement. The other variables are moral leadership,
identification with leader, and control variables like gender, education, experience and many
more.

2ARTICLE SUMMARY
The validity analysis results that all the variables taken into account, have distinguishable
construction. The descriptive statistics analysis provides the slope coefficients, p-values and the
correlation coefficients of the variables. These measures are useful to indicate that the two
mediators namely, LMX and identification with leader are significant having confidence interval
of 0.01 and 0.19 at 95% significance level (Shen, 2014).
The goal of the study to provide necessary contribution to the creativity theory. It
investigates the complex process of moral leadership facilitating the employee creativity. In the
Chinese perspective, the employees, in the environment of high power distance and high
communism, depend on the organizational authority more than the low power distance culture.
Moreover, a highly improved LMX relationship can be built by maintaining a reliable
relationship with the leaders. Based on the research, in the modern Chinese society, maximum
corruption exits for the managers having lowest ethical values. Thus, the achievement of success
comes through the implication of moral values (Yidong & Xinxin, 2013). The ethical vision is
important to maintain the moral work culture and it ultimately results in employee creativity.
Moreover, all the hypotheses suggests the positive relationship with the moral leadership and
employee identification with leader.
The above research study concludes that the concept of the positive relationship between
moral leadership and the employee creativity is supported by the theory of collectivism and
Confucianism. The conciliation of the employee identification for the positive relationship
between employee creativity and moral leadership. Moreover, LMX completely arbitrates the
positive association of the employee creativity and employee linkage with the leader. The
Confucianism theory supports the contributions for building the new specifications regarding the
employee creativity and moral leadership.

3ARTICLE SUMMARY

4ARTICLE SUMMARY
References
Harwiki, W. (2013). The influence of servant leadership on organization culture, organizational
commitment, organizational citizenship behavior and employees’ performance (study of
outstanding cooperatives in East Java Province, Indonesia). Journal of Economics and
Behavioral Studies, 5(12), 876-885.
Li, C., Zhao, H., & Begley, T. M. (2015). Transformational leadership dimensions and employee
creativity in China: A cross-level analysis. Journal of Business Research, 68(6), 1149-
1156.
Shen, Y., Jackson, T., Ding, C., Yuan, D., Zhao, L., Dou, Y., & Zhang, Q. (2014). Linking
perceived organizational support with employee work outcomes in a Chinese context:
Organizational identification as a mediator. European Management Journal, 32(3), 406-
412.
Yidong, T., & Xinxin, L. (2013). How ethical leadership influence employees’ innovative work
behavior: A perspective of intrinsic motivation. Journal of business ethics, 116(2), 441-
455.