Abstract

Creativity of employee is a critical factor to the competitive advantage and organizational survival.With the comprehensive development of science and technology，collaborative community-based cross-organizational cooperation，has replaced the lonely hero’s individual employee innovation model gradually and been the direct driving force for organizational innovation in a R&D team.Leaders，who can inspire employee creativity and team creativity at the same time，are widely commended in practice.Furthermore，authentic leadership theory，which based on the personal qualities of leadership，dedication and exemplary role and impact of Subordinate’s values，has led the study of Western frontier.This “virtue”leader theory has a great agreement with Chinese traditional culture.Therefore，this research focuses on “How does the authentic leadership impact the creativity on the individual and team level”.

Firstly，this research proves the existence of authentic leadership in China.When Chinese evaluated a leader，people tend to expect leaders can be “equal ability and virtue integrity”.Although Chinese admitsthat the team organization and team sustain function remainthe necessary part of leaders’ work，the leader’s virtue quality also attracts special attentions.It’s due to the different understanding of the leaders’ conceptualization between Chinese and westerners.A leader having equal ability and virtue integrity can lead to positive the behavior of the individual and team behavior.Therefore，studies on the authentic leadership in the Chinese context leadership，employee behavior and the influence of team behavior will help us enrich theoretical.

Secondly，this research establishes the relationship between creativity and authentic leadership.All previous work sfocused on individual level study，such as transformational leadership，supportive leadership and individual employee creativity.There are two disadvantages in these studies：（1）caring “Efficiency”，the effectiveness of management of the impact on employee creativity，too much；but ignore the impact of leader’s “virtue” on employee creativity.In fact，leader’s “virtue”will also affect the attitude of subordinate series.When subordinates perceive the authentic leader by example，they will feel more superior support，thus this feeling will promote the upgrading of employee creativity.（2）The research methods in previous works were limited at individual-level.All these works can’t explain how the leader affects the team creativity by the internal climate of the whole team and the effect of authentic climate on employee creativity.Based on the above analysis，this study will build a relationship between the authentic climate，authentic leadership and creativity on the multi-level perspective，which will focus on the logical relationship among the authentic climate，authentic leadership and employee creativity.

Thirdly，this research tests the western scale in the context of China.To guarantee the reliability and validity of the measurement instrument，the author tried to adopt the existing scales developed in previous works as the empirical evidence.In this test，employees will evaluate the authentic leadership，superior support，team mutual and team creativity，and also team leaders can evaluate the employee creativity.In this test，some controlling variables，such as employee and leaders’ individual characteristics，team characteristics of team size，team development stage and task progress status，were selected.Before large scale investigation，in order to achieve the research objectives the author invited two team leaders（one with 5 years’，another with 8 years’ team leader experience）and eight R&D team members（average with 3.15 years’ R&D team work experience）who work in Wuhan to take part in our research.Then，the author divided them into five groups（each group invite one to three）to have a face-to-face discussion group.Some changes were made on questionnaire items，question sequence，word expressions according to the result of pretest.The date was collected from 13 cities and 113 R&D teams during the period of April to August 2010.

Finally，according to the above analysis，this research has a deeply insight into the mechanism between the employee creativity and individual-level/team-level authentic leadership.It proves that the authentic leadership has a positively relationship to employee creativity at different level.The research also shows that team mutual action and superior support are the effective methods to improve the creativity of the R&D team.

The destinations of this dissertation are to enrich authentic leadership and creativity theory and have a great significance to guide China’s R&D team leader’s practice work.The four contributions of this work are focused on：（1）Developing authentic leadership’s empirical study from individual level to team level，and proving authentic leadership in the team；（2）Finding a multiple levels mechanisms among the authentic climate，authentic leadership and creative，a new direction for the integration of leadership and creativity research；（3）Proving that superior support can mediate positively between authentic climate and employee creativity，team mutual action has a positively affect between authentic climate and team creativity，and building a“bridges” between authentic climate and creativity；（4）Testing the theory of authentic leadership which was developed by the western scholars in the Chinese Localization.

Finally，due to the limitation of the author’s knowledge and ability，as well as some external limitations，this research remains some limitations such as nonrandomized sampling，cross-sectional research and limited survey objectives.Much improvement is needed in future studies.

Key Words：Authentic Climate；Authentic leadership；Creativity；Multi-level model；R&D team