How does entrepreneurial leadership affect employees’ taking charge? A cross-level moderated mediation process

Qin Lin and Lingfeng Yi ()
Additional contact information
Qin Lin: Guangdong University of Foreign Studies
Lingfeng Yi: East China Normal University

Asia Pacific Journal of Management, 2025, vol. 42, issue 1, No 18, 405-425

Abstract: Abstract Drawing on the proactive motivation model, this study aims to investigate how entrepreneurial leadership at the organizational level influences employees’ taking charge at the individual level, as mediated by thriving at work and moderated by employees’ autonomy orientation. Through a two-wave questionnaire survey of 356 employees from high-tech enterprises in China, this study uses multilevel structural equation modeling to test the proposed hypotheses. The results show that organizational entrepreneurial leadership has a positive impact on individual employee taking charge and thriving at work partially mediates this relationship across levels. Additionally, employees’ autonomy orientation positively moderates not only the effect of thriving at work on employees’ taking charge but also the mediation of thriving at work in the aforementioned relationship. This study advances knowledge about entrepreneurial leadership stimulating employees’ intrinsic motivation to drive their taking charge. The psychological perspective and cross-level process deepen the research on entrepreneurial leadership effectiveness and employees’ proactive behavior, and further provide empirical evidence for executives to prompt employees to take charge.

Keywords: Entrepreneurial leadership; Taking charge; Thriving at work; Autonomy orientation; Cross-level (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10490-023-09943-z Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:asiapa:v:42:y:2025:i:1:d:10.1007_s10490-023-09943-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... 29/journal/10490/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10490-023-09943-z

Access Statistics for this article

Asia Pacific Journal of Management is currently edited by Jane Lu

More articles in Asia Pacific Journal of Management from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().