Influence of Health Promoting Leadership and Leader Humor on Employee Innovation Performance: The Role Positive Emotions

Understanding how leadership styles conducive to employee innovation performance is one of the main focuses in organizational behavior literature. In this paper, we use broaden-and-build theory to examine how health promotes leadership and leader humor affect employee innovation performance, focusing on positive emotion mediation. By using a survey data consisting of 410 full-time employees from several large state-owned companies in China, the results indicate that both health promoting leadership and leader humor significantly relate to positive emotions among employees, which in turn, enhances their innovation performance. This article makes contributions to the literature by emphasizing the role of leadership styles in creating an environment that encourages creativity and innovation by the mechanism of positive emotions.