Self-Leadership and Psychological Capital as Mediators in the Influence of Leader Motivating Language on Everyday Innovative Behavior

Innovation is critical to the growth and prosperity of an organization. In daily work, everyday innovation is more often developed by employees than large-scale institutional innovation. This research builds a multi-level framework to investigate how leader motivating language (LML) influences the everyday innovative behavior of employees in the international freight forwarding industry. In addition, we examined the mediating effect of individual-level self-leadership and psychological capital (PsyCap). We used HLM6.8 to perform hierarchical linear modeling on 551 valid questionnaires from 88 teams. The results showed that: (1) LML was a positive predictor of employees’ innovative behaviors, (2) LML positively affects employees’ self-leadership and PsyCap, and (3) self-leadership and PsyCap partially mediated the relationship between LML and employees’ innovative behaviors. We also used Mplus8.3 to conduct a multi-level path analysis to verify the robustness of the results. Further, we investigated the sequential mediation effects of self-leadership and PsyCap between LML and innovative behavior. These findings complement existing research and emphasize the importance of motivational language in organizational management.