Team Leader Job Anxiety and Team Innovation: The Roles of Self-Serving Behavior and Psychological Entitlement

In this article, we identify leader job anxiety as a critical leader emotion relevant to team innovation. Integrating the literature on job anxiety and innovation and treating leader self-serving behavior as a mediator, we explore the relationship between leader job anxiety and team innovation. Further, we hypothesize and examine leader psychological entitlement as a moderator of the relationship. We conducted two studies to test our hypotheses. In Study 1, we used multisource data gathered from 69 team leaders and 210 team members of a high-tech software company in Northern China. In Study 2, we used a multisource, time-lagged research design to collect data from 121 team leaders and 404 team members of a large biopharmaceutical company in Northern China. We found that leader job anxiety positively relates to leader self-serving behavior and that leader psychological entitlement positively moderates this relationship. In addition, leader self-serving behavior mediates the negative relationship between leader job anxiety and team innovation. Further, we discuss theoretical and practical implications related to work teams and team innovation.