Counterproductive work behavior wastes organizational resources and significantly damages organizational development. The importance of employees’ counterproductive work behaviors in organizations is becoming increasingly obvious. This is directly related to the sustainable development and survival of organizations. This study believes that employee’s behavior is closely related to leadership style. In particular, employees’ in small- and medium-sized enterprises are often manipulated and deceived by leaders, resulting in dissatisfaction and counterproductive work behavior. In order to address this behavior, this study collected survey data from 289 employees from Chinese SMEs to explore the relationship between perceived abusive supervision and organizational political behavior in Machiavellian leadership and counterproductive work behavior. The results suggest that Machiavellian positive influence counterproductive work behavior through a mediating role of perceived abusive supervision. Furthermore, leader organizational political behavior moderates the indirect effect of perceived abusive supervision such that the effect is stronger when leader organizational political behavior is high. This study aimed to identify the variables that increase employees counterproductive work behavior, propose recommendations for reducing employees’ counterproductive work behavior, expanded the scope of counterproductive work behavior research, and provided a theoretical basis for related studies.

In the era of the fourth industrial revolution, competition among IT industries is becoming increasingly fierce. If a company is weak in its competitive advantage, it can have a huge negative impact on its organizational sustainability and ultimately lead to organizational failure. In such a research background, we highlighted that employees’ innovative performance via creativity acts as an alternative lubricant to increase the sustainable competitive advantage and promote overall organizational sustainability. In particular, employees’ innovative performance has a great relationship with organizational culture and types of leadership. Hence, we focused on exploring the ways in which visionary leadership increases employees’ innovative performance, presenting and verifying a moderated mediation research model related to the innovative performance. To verify our research model, this study conducted a survey of 303 employees from the information technology (IT) industry of SMEs in China. According to the results, visionary leadership was found to have a positive influence on both psychological empowerment and employees’ innovative performance. In addition, psychological empowerment partially mediated the impact of visionary leadership on the innovation performance. Finally, the organizational learning culture moderated the effects of psychological empowerment and the innovation performance. Overall, this study contributes to revealing the process that leads to employees’ innovative performance and contributes to expanding the research field by verifying the moderated mediation model for a sustainable competitive advantage and organizational sustainability in IT Industry 4.0 for SMEs.