A new lens of how inclusive leadership affects employee innovation performance: the combined role of leader-employee job crafting

Inclusive leadership has been identified as playing a key role in promoting employee innovation. However, previous studies on the mechanism of inclusive leadership influencing employee innovation performance have ignored the fact that innovation requires a substantive change process at work. Therefore, drawing on social learning theory and social information processing theory, we adopt the perspective of job crafting, which is characterized by a substantive changing process, and respectively introduce employee job crafting and leader job crafting to reveal this mechanism. The results of matching leader-employee data from 62 teams in high-tech industries showed that inclusive leadership can enhance employee innovation performance via prompting employee job crafting, and leader job crafting moderates the effect of inclusive leadership on employee job crafting, employee job crafting on employee innovation performance and the indirect relationship between inclusive leadership and employee innovation performance through employee job crafting. By revealing the mediating role of employee job crafting and the moderating effect of leader job crafting at two separate stages, this study provides new knowledge on the process mechanism of an inclusive leader's role in fostering employee innovation, and adds valuable insights for management practice.