Secure-base Leadership and Employee Innovative Behavior

Abstract

Secure-base leadership is the way a leader builds trust and influences others by providing a sense of protection, safety and caring and by providing a source of inspiration that together produce energy for exploration-daring, risk-taking and challenge-seeking. Unlike traditional leadership styles, secure-base leadership helps employees to step out of their comfort zones and maximize their potentials by integrating between “care” and “dare”. Despite of its enormous research value, there has been little empirical study on secure-base leadership yet. The findings from the extant literature are not able to provide an insight into the mediational path and boundary condition between secure-base leadership and some specific employee behaviors, which is not instructive to the theory construction of secure-base leadership and to provide practical guidance for corporations.To fill the above gaps, based on the attachment theory, we explore how secure-base leadership motivates employee innovative behavior. This study, first of all, explores the mediation effect of psychological safety and creative self-efficacy between secure-base leadership and employee innovative behavior from the perspective of psychological cognition. Then, it discusses the effectiveness of secure-base leadership from the perspective of attachment anxiety style. In total, 290 valid employee questionnaires were collected from three-wave survey in China. Hypotheses are tested by SEM,bootstrap and hierarchical regression analysis. Results show that: Secure-base leadership is positively related to employee innovative behavior, which is double mediated by psychological safety and creative self-efficacy. Attachment anxiety style strengthens the positive correlation between secure-base leadership and employees’ psychological safety, but it does not moderate the positive correlation between secure-base leadership and employees’ creative self-efficacy.This study has three theoretical contributions: First, this study focuses on the influence of secure-base leadership and finds that it can promote employee innovative behavior. Not only does this result promote the theory construction of secure-base leadership, but also it enriches the antecedent research on employee innovation. Second, from the perspective of attachment theory, this study fully reveals the mediational path between secure-base leadership and employee innovative behavior by considering both psychological safety and creative self-efficacy as mediators simultaneously. This not only expands the application of attachment theory in the field of organizational behavior, but also perfects the research on the psychological mechanism connecting secure-base leadership and employee innovative behavior. Last, by introducing attachment anxiety style as the moderator, this study further clarifies the boundary condition of the effectiveness of secure-base leadership.