ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Organizational Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1629241
Unpacking the relationship leader affiliative humor and employee innovative behavior: Multilevel roles of role breadth self-efficacy and team trust
Provisionally accepted
- 1Personnel Department, Zhejiang Tongji Vocational College of Science and Technology, Hangzhou, China
- 2Qingdao University of Technology, Qingdao, China
- 3Linyi univeristy, Linyi, China
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Employee innovative behavior stands as a pivotal factor influencing the core competitiveness of enterprises. Extant research indicates that leadership style is a crucial factor driving employee innovative behavior. Based on social information processing theory, this study focuses on the multilevel mechanism of leader affiliative humor (LAFH) on employee innovative behavior. Through a multi-source, two-stage questionnaire survey, paired sample data were collected from 79 leaders and 302 employees. The results indicate that LAFH has a significant positive effect on role breadth self-efficacy, team trust, and employee innovative behavior, respectively. Role breadth self-efficacy and team trust play a multilevel mediating role in the relationship between LAFH and employee innovative behavior. Besides, team trust exerts a significant multilevel moderating effect on the relationship between LAFH and role breadth self-efficacy, with a stronger positive relationship when team trust is higher.
Keywords: Employee innovative behavior, Leader affiliative humor, role breadth self-efficacy, Team trust, multilevel research
Received: 15 May 2025; Accepted: 22 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zhang, Xu and Yu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Ruixiao Yu, yuruixiao@lyu.edu.cn
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