Measures
Authentic leadership. AL was measured using the 16-item Authentic
Leadership Inventory (ALI) developed by Neider and Schriesheim (2011) ( =
.924). Sample items include “My leader says exactly what he or she means,” and
“My leader asks for ideas that challenge his/her beliefs and actions.”
Employees’ emotions. We adopted the 14-item Job Emotion Scale developed
by Cole, Bruch, and Vogel (2006) to measure employees’ emotions. The positive
emotions subscale ( = .911) is composed of assessment of six specific positive
emotional states, including courage and enthusiasm. The negative emotions
subscale ( = .934) includes assessment of seven negative states, such as sadness
and frustration, and one reverse-scored item “calmness.”
Employee innovation. To measure employee innovation we employed the
nine-item scale ( = .918) developed by Janssen (2004). Participants respond to
items listed under the question “How often do you perform the following work
activities?” with sample items including “Creating new ideas to solve difficult
issues,” and “Transforming innovative ideas into useful applications.”
Control variables. We set gender, age, education level, job tenure as control
variables at the individual level and team size at the team level, to control the
confounding effect on relationships among variables.
We used a Chinese version of the survey, which was translated from English.
A double-blind backtranslation procedure was used to ensure the reliability and
validity of the translation. Responses to all variables were given on a 5-point
Likert-type scale (1 = strongly disagree and 5 = strongly agree).
Data Aggregate
With the aim of researching team members’ shared perceptions about AL,
we aggregated individual-level AL to the team level. To check the reliability of
this aggregation, we calculated within-team agreement (rwg = .745; above the
recommended minimum of .700), intraclass correlations (ICC1 = .276; above the
recommended minimum of .120), and the reliability of the means (ICC2 = .715;
above the recommended minimum of .700) with significance set at p < .01. The
results indicate our conceptualization of AL at the team level was appropriate
Results
Descriptive statistics relating to variables at both individual and team levels
are presented in Table 1. Results show that there was a significant positive
relationship between employees’ positive emotions and employee innovation at
the individual level.