Exploring the Way to Increase Organizational Members’ Innovative Behavior: Testing the Moderated Mediation Role of Cognition-Based Trust and Serial Multiple Mediation Model

Abstract

Psychological safety is an essential variable that leads to organizational members to perform more difficult task and reinforce challenging behaviors. Furthermore, psychological safety promotes organizational members to present both new ideas and opinions. It may increase organizational members' innovative behavior to lead to organizational innovation and sustainability. In particular, the importance of organizational members' innovative behavior is emphasized because it directly impacts on organizational survival and growth. Based on this, we focused on the way to improve innovative behavior and verifying our research model. Most of previous researches focused only on the mediating effect or the moderating effect on the process of driving innovative behavior. However, we clearly clarified the process of driving innovative behavior via psychological safety. Specifically, the serial multiple mediating role of cognition-based trust in leader and subordinates' voice behavior was verified for the process in which psychological safety induces innovative behavior. Furthermore, the moderated mediating effect of cognition-based trust in leader was verified. In order to verify hypotheses, we focused on employees who works in Chinese SMEs, and a total of 306 data were used for empirical analysis. Our results showed psychological safety had a positive influence on cognition-based trust in leader, voice behavior, and innovative behavior. In addition, cognition-based trust in leader was found to improve subordinates' voice behavior and innovative behavior. It was also found that subordinates' voice behavior had a positive influence on innovative behavior. Furthermore, cognition-based trust in leader and subordinates' voice behavior showed significant Serial Multiple mediating effect in the process of subordinates' psychological safety affecting subordinates' innovative behavior. Finally, cognition-based trust in leader showed a positive moderating effect on the relationship between subordinates' psychological safety and their voice behavior. However, the moderated mediation effect was found to be insignificant. According to these results, we presented theoretical and practical implications. Overall, this study contributed to expanding the research area related to subordinates' innovative behavior.