KOREASCHOLAR

With the advent of globalization and the accompanying rapid changes in economic environments, firms have gradually transformed their mode of operations from one based on the traditional good-dominant logic to one based on service-dominant logic. The emergence of service-dominant logic has resulted in the development of value co-creation, which refers to the process through which firms, suppliers, and customers all become involved in the discovery and creation of product value and create added value through even and reasonable distribution. Drawing upon the SDT theory, the current study has the following three research objectives. First, the current study investigated the influence of transformational leadership on employee-based value co-creation and the impact of transformational leadership on employees’ intrinsic motivation to further enhance their value co-creation. Second, this study sought to understand the mediating mechanisms between transformational leadership and employee-based value co-creation; financial and non-financial variables were used as the mediators to explore whether the financial incentive affects employees’ intrinsic motivational process with regard to the transformational leadership that leads to employees’ intrinsic motivation. Third, positive psychological capital was used as a mediator to examine whether it mediates the relationship between the financial perspective and value co-creation. Fourth, self-concordance was also adopted to examine whether self-concordance mediates the relationship between the financial perspective and value co-creation. We collected 513 survey responses from 81 teams in firms from diverse industries in Taiwan. The present study makes the following contributions. First, previous research related to leadership behavior primarily focused on the influences of leadership behaviors on employee attitudes and behaviors. Only a few studies addressed the impact of leadership on value co-creation. Drawing on the self-determination theory to build our research framework, our study contributes to the field by investigating how transformational leadership stimulates employee-based value co-creation. Second, the present study investigated the psychological mechanisms involved in the motivational process in the context of the ways in which transformational leadership facilitates changes in employee behavior, particularly for employees’ intrinsic motivation. Third, the present study proved that financial and non-financial incentives respectively mediated the relationship between transformational leadership and positive psychological capital. Additionally, both financial and non-financial incentives mediated the relationship between transformational leadership and self-concordance. These results suggest that both financial and non-financial incentives could be effective ways for transformational leaders to intrinsically motivate their employees. These findings are valuable contributions to the leadership studies field. Fourth, the present study adopted hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) to conduct a multi-level analysis of the relationship between transformational leadership and value co-creation.

• Chan Hsiao(National Chiao Tung University, Republic of China)
• Yi-Hsuan Lee(National Central University, Republic of China)
• Hao-Hsin Hsu(National Chiao Tung University, Republic of China)