Author(s): Qiang Li, Yingji Li
Innovation, as a key element for the perpetual competitiveness and vitality of an enterprise, is increasingly receiving widespread attention from both the theoretical and practical communities. However, in reality there are often many employees who have creative thinking and expertise, but they are not fully recognized and respected by their work teams, resulting in the inability of employees to initiate innovation. In the Chinese cultural context, differential treatment by leaders is common and plays a unique role in corporate management practices. Differential leadership is attracting more and more attention as a special leadership style, but there are relatively few empirical studies on the impact of differential leadership on employees' innovative behavior. This study is based on the characteristics of differential leadership style in Chinese management context, and investigates the motivation of employees' innovative behavior under differential leadership style. The study is mainly based on team relationship conflict as the mediator, and examines the mechanism of differential leadership style on employees' innovative behavior, and constructs a behavioral model of differential leadership style on employees' innovative behavior.