Tough love and improvisation: how authoritarian leadership moderated by benevolence affects employee improvisation

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the mechanism of authoritarian leadership affecting employee improvisation and to verify the moderating effect of benevolent leadership based on social influence theory and conservation of resources theory. Design/methodology/approach The authors used regression analysis and the bootstrapping method to test the research hypotheses with data from 317 leader-member dyads in China. This study also adopted the time-lag design and multi-source data approach to minimize common method bias. Findings The results indicate that authoritarian leadership has a significant negative impact on employees’ perceived error tolerance and employee improvisation. Employees’ perceived error tolerance positively affects employee improvisation and can play a mediating role between authoritarian leadership and employee improvisation. Benevolent leadership can not only moderate the direct relationship between authoritarian leadership and employees’ perceived error tolerance and buffer the negative impact of authoritarian leadership on employees’ perceived error tolerance but also moderate the indirect relationship between authoritarian leadership and employee improvisation via perceived error tolerance. Practical implications The results of this study remind managers to recognize the potential harm of authoritarian leadership to employees’ perceived error tolerance and improvisation and limit the negative impact of authoritarian leadership by establishing fault-tolerant mechanisms, encouraging innovation and demonstrating a benevolent leadership style in management practices so that employees dare to actively and flexibly use existing resources and conditions to solve problems creatively in their work. Originality/value The existing research on leadership and employee improvisation mainly focuses on positive leadership, and little is known about how negative leadership and ambidextrous leadership with complementary differences affect employee improvisation. This study introduces perceived error tolerance and benevolent leadership into the research model, which is innovative in explaining the relationship between authoritarian leadership and employee improvisation. On the one hand, it explains the psychological mechanism of authoritarian leadership affecting employee improvisation. On the other hand, it examines the effectiveness of the ambidextrous leadership of benevolent authority (i.e. tough love) and adds to literature on ambidextrous leadership in the context of Eastern culture.