How does coaching leadership promote employee's constructive deviance? Affective events perspective

PurposeAdopting an affective events perspective, this paper proposes and tests a moderated-mediation model linking coaching leadership (CL), positive emotion at work (PEW), proactive personality (PP) and constructive deviance (CD).Design/methodology/approachAltogether, 225 supervisor-subordinate pairs from 45 teams within a large Chinese manufacturing enterprise took part in our study. To keep common method bias to a minimal, two sources of data were used (subordinates and their direct supervisors).Findings(1) CL and employee CD have a positive association; (2) employee PEW mediates the connection between CL and employee CD; (3) the positive association between CL and follower PEW is moderated by employee PP such that PP strengthens the CL-PEW relationship (4) employee PP accentuates the indirect impact of CL on employee CD via employee PEW. Specifically, the indirect link is insignificant when PP is low.Originality/value(1) The results of this study enrich the CD literature; (2) the work puts forward a simple but foundational framework for understanding the CL process; (3) the third contribution arises from examining the influence of employee PP on the relationship between CL and employee CD.