Don't Let Intimacy Become Burden: The Double-Edged Effect of Supervisor-Subordinate Emotional Guanxi on Breakthrough Innovation

Wan Pengyu; Zheng Junwei; Zhang Zhenduo

doi:10.16719/j.cnki.1671-6981.20230516

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Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2023, Vol. 46 ›› Issue (5) : 1156-1163. DOI: 10.16719/j.cnki.1671-6981.20230516

Social，Personality & Organizational Psychology

Don't Let Intimacy Become Burden: The Double-Edged Effect of Supervisor-Subordinate Emotional Guanxi on Breakthrough Innovation

Wan Pengyu¹, Zheng Junwei², Zhang Zhenduo³

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Abstract

In Chinese organizations where "guanxi orientation" is a typical feature, the superior-subordinate guanxi not only has high local research value, but is also closely related to the effective operation and innovation development of the organization. Previous studies only paid attention to the positive role of superior-subordinate guanxi on employee innovation, little attention has been paid to the emotional guanxi with the most Chinese situational characteristics and its double-edged sword effect on employee innovation. Many questions remain. For example, how to identify the emotional guanxi in the relationship between superiors and subordinates to promote the new progress of local research? Does supervisor-subordinate emotional guanxi have a positive effect on employees' breakthrough innovation just like supervisor-subordinate guanxi? Or are there negative effects? What are the internal mechanisms and boundaries? These bottlenecks make the defects of previous studies that ignored the relationship between superiors and subordinates and ignored its two sides increasingly exposed.
Integrating the perspective of "kinship-like" and "tool-like" of the exchange theory, this paper discusses the double-edged sword path and boundary of superior-subordinate emotional guanxi affecting employees' breakthrough innovation through felt responsibility and psychological attachment. We recruited 480 employees from Chinese enterprises in internet communication, intelligent manufacturing and financial securities industry to complete questionnaires using a two-wave research design. Employees were invited to report their perceived supervisor-subordinate emotional guanxi, leader's positive language framework and leader's negative language framework in the first data collection. Then, those participants who completed time 1 surveys were invited back to report their breakthrough innovation, felt responsibility, and psychological attachment. We employed SPSS 26.0 and Amos 24.0 to test our hypotheses.
The results of regression analyses showed that supervisor-subordinate emotional guanxi positively affected breakthrough innovation by improving felt responsibility, and leader's positive language framework strengthened the mediating effect of felt responsibility. Supervisor-subordinate emotional guanxi negatively affected breakthrough innovation by deepening psychological attachment, and the mediating effect of psychological attachment was strengthened by leader's negative language framework. The study promotes the research progress of superior-subordinate guanxi in the Chinese context from the emotional perspective, integrates the different perspectives of felt responsibility and psychological attachment, and deconstructs the double-edged sword effect of superior-subordinate emotional guanxi on breakthrough innovation.

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Wan Pengyu, Zheng Junwei, Zhang Zhenduo. Don't Let Intimacy Become Burden: The Double-Edged Effect of Supervisor-Subordinate Emotional Guanxi on Breakthrough Innovation[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2023, 46(5): 1156-1163 https://doi.org/10.16719/j.cnki.1671-6981.20230516

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