Temporal Leadership and Bootlegging Behavior of Employees: The Mediating Effect of Self-Efficacy.

Mingze Li,Huili Ye

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.633261

Abstract

As an important source of innovation, bootlegging is widespread in organizations. However, a lack of understanding exists in its antecedents. Based on the social cognition theory, this study aims to explore when and how temporal leadership (TL) leads to bootlegging behaviors (BOs) of employees, with self-efficacy (SE) as a mediator and perceived team efficacy (TE) as a moderator. We conducted a two-stage questionnaire survey and collected data from 231 employees from four companies located in Wuhan, P.R. China. SPSS and Mplus are used for testing our model, and the results are shown as following: TL positively affects the BO of employees. Besides, SE plays a mediating role in the relationship between TL and bootlegging, and perceived TE has a moderating effect between TL and SE. Also, perceived TE moderated the indirect effect of TL on bootlegging via SE. This study identifies the internal mechanism between time management and bootlegging, which provides an instructive view for further study on organizational innovation management. Theoretical contrition and practical implication have been discussed in this study.

Highlights

Innovation is important during the development of an organization
The measurement of temporal leadership (TL), SE, and perceived team efficacy (TE) had met the general requirements of average variance extracted (AVE) (≥0.5) (Fornell and Larcker, 1981), and the measurement of BO had an acceptable standard of AVE (Fornell and Larcker, 1981; Lam, 2012)
TL creates an “urgent” work environment for employees (Gevers and Demerouti, 2013) and reduces their autonomy (Hubens, 2011), this study finds that TL makes employees focus more on the task time and increases employee confidence in engaging in informal innovation activities, which drives BO of employees via their SE, which shows that the innovation promoted by TL can exist with the form of BO

Summary

Introduction

Innovation is important during the development of an organization. If an organization wants to gain advantages in fierce competition, it needs to innovate constantly (D’aveni, 2010). That is, bootlegging behavior (BO) refers to the spontaneous and secret innovation behavior of employees which is expected to be beneficial to an organization (Criscuolo et al, 2014) This kind of behavior is common in the technology industry and manufacturing industry. BMW’s 12-cylinder engine and Agilent Technologies’ 1200 series chemical test equipment were the products of BOs by employees Having made these products marketable, the companies gained a competitive advantage over their competitors (Masoudnia and Szwejczewski, 2012). 3M has a 15% rule that encourages employees to bypass management and engage in private innovation in the hope that employees will bring beneficial innovations to the company Since this kind of behavior is a prevalent and important phenomenon in the organization, there are still questions needed to be answered

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Discussion

Conclusion