How Does Distributed Leadership Promote Employees' Innovation Behavior: Mediating Role of idiosyncratic deals and Moderating Role of Proactive Personality

Background: As a new way of leadership, distributed leadership plays an important role in dealing with complex external environment, optimizing organizational decision-making and promoting employee participation. Based on social cognitive theory, this paper reveals how distributed leadership promotes employees' innovation behavior through idiosyncratic deals, as well as moderating role of proactive personality in this process. Methods In order to reduce the effects of common method biases and causal lag effect, this study was divided into three stages for data collection, with a time interval of half a month. 321 employees from 7 enterprises in Wuhan, China were selected as samples. Hypothesis test was carried out by Linear Regression method, Bootstrap method and Johnson-Neyman method. Results The results show that distributed leadership is positively related to innovation behavior; distributed leadership has a positive impact on innovation behavior through idiosyncratic deals; proactive personality positively moderates the relationship between distributed leadership and idiosyncratic deals, and further moderates mediating effect of idiosyncratic deals between distributed leadership and innovation behavior. Conclusion This paper expands the research perspective of distributed leadership, indicating that it can not only support employees from top to bottom, but also enable employees to actively negotiate idiosyncratic deals with the organization from bottom to top, which promotes the enthusiasm and initiative of employees in innovation. This provides theoretical basis and practical enlightenment for managers to adopt distributed leadership.