Introduction

Managers’ leadership has been widely considered as the key factor affecting employee creativity (Herrmann and Felfe, 2013; Le et al., 2017; Shalley and Gilson, 2004; Shalley et al., 2004; Qu et al., 2015). The various leadership styles, such as empowering leadership and transformational leadership, have been applied to exercise managers’ formal authority and position power, which have largely played the positive role in affecting employee creativity (Gong et al., 2009; Zhang and Bartol, 2010). Recently, however, much attention has focused on “the dark, or destructive, side of leadership” (Lee et al., 2013). The increase in frequency of such destructive leader behaviors and their significant impact on organizational and individual outcomes in the workplace are important reasons for this research interest. One such a construct that embodies leaders’ ineffective behavior is that of authoritarian leadership, which refers to a leadership approach that emphasizes leaders’ absolute authority and requires subordinates to be absolutely obedient (Cheng et al., 2000). Particularly in the Chinese culture, authoritarian leadership has been viewed as an important contextual factor that affect employees’ willingness and motivation to engage in creative activities because authoritarian leadership emphasize on obedience to authority and discourage the creative thinking of employee (Zhang et al., 2011). Given its dominance role in Chinese modern organizations (Zhang et al., 2015) and its significant role in influencing employee behaviors, few studies have begun to examine the effects of authoritarian leadership on creativity. For example, Zhang et al. (2011) reported a negative relationship between authoritarian leadership and group creativity at the group level. However, the extant literature is marked by some concerning limitations. First, although some scholars have started to explore the mediators between authoritarian leadership and employee outcomes (Chen et al., 2014), the underlying psychological mechanisms linking authoritarian leadership and employee creativity still are not fully understood. Given the fact that authoritarian leadership can influence employees’ psychological connections to their leaders and teams (Chan et al., 2013; Chen et al., 2014; Schaubroeck et al., 2017), and such psychological connections will ultimately contribute to employee creativity (Shalley and Perry-Smith, 2001), the potential psychological mediators linking authoritarian leadership and employee creativity should be clarified. One goal of this study is to address this limitation by identifying the psychological processes underlying the relationship between authoritarian leadership and employee creativity. Second, the effect of authoritarian leadership is contingent on individual differences, such as cultural values, but limited relevant research work has been done. Previous studies have argued that the cultural values employees hold play an important role in how employees react to authoritarian leadership (Pellegrini and Scandura, 2008; Schaubroeck et al., 2017). Therefore, another goal of this study is to empirically investigate the potential moderating role of cultural values to provide a better understanding of the relationship between authoritarian leadership and employee creativity. In this article, we draw from social exchange perspective that highlight the role of employees’ perceptions of their social exchange relationships with their leaders to argue that LMX mediates the relationship between authoritarian leadership and employee creativity.