Depending on the organizational context, a control orientation on the part of an employee may either inhibit or promote their innovative job performance. To explore the question of which external conditions are conducive to control-oriented employees’ innovative potential, this study examined the effects of servant leadership on control-oriented employees’ motivation internalization processes and innovative job performance from a self-determination theory perspective. This study was conducted in Jiangsu, Shanghai, and Anhui provinces, which are relatively developed high-tech industries in China. An analysis of paired data from 298 employees and their leaders in nine technology-intensive companies revealed that servant leadership plays a positive moderating role between control orientation and employees’ autonomous motivation. Moreover, the interaction between control orientation and servant leadership can affect innovative job performance through the mediation of identified regulation, but not through that of integrated regulation. These findings are beneficial in promoting healthy development and innovative job performance of control-oriented employees, and are instructive for sustainable human resource management. Organizations should recognize the creative potential of control-oriented employees, promote servant leadership, leverage its management strengths, and focus on enhancing employees’ sense of identification with their jobs.

As an important outcome of team innovation, team creativity has become an important issue in academia and industry. Meanwhile, the horizontal leadership model has been preliminarily proven to be effective in improving the output of innovation performance. Multiple chain mediating effects of team psychological safety climate, cognitive motivation and social motivation on shared leadership and team creativity in innovative teams were proposed on the basis of social network theory and group dynamics theory. In this study, 178 innovation teams and 2011 innovation team members were given questionnaires, and the obtained data were empirically analyzed. The results show that shared leadership has a significant positive effect on team creativity in innovative teams; team psychological safety climates, cognitive motivation and social motivation play a partial mediating role between shared leadership and team creativity, and play a chain mediating role together. At the team level, the study verifies the positive effect of shared leadership on team creativity and reveals the complex team process.

How and when do uncertain factors affect employees’ different types of proactive behavior? Building on the strength model of self-control, the present study examines the different effects of job insecurity on individual-oriented and organizational-oriented proactive behaviors, and the moderating role of future work self salience (FWSS) and socioeconomic status (SES). Two-wave data collected from 227 employees in China were used to test our hypotheses. The results indicate that job insecurity is negatively associated with all the proactive behaviors. Moreover, the FWSS positively moderates the above relationship, and the moderating role on individual-oriented proactive behavior is stronger than organizational-oriented proactive behavior. The SES negatively moderates the relationship between job insecurity and the two types of proactive behaviors. In addition, the FWSS and SES have a three-way interactive effect on the relationship between job insecurity and individual task proactive behavior. The practical implications of these results are discussed.