Empowerment

Independent innovation is the key for modern enterprises to build core competitiveness in a dynamic environment and related to their survival and development. Moreover, individual innovation is the foundation of organizational innovation. As the main body of enterprise innovation, employees' innovation behavior has a positive influence on enterprise innovation performance. Thus, research on employees' innovation behavior has become a hot issue.

Early research on employees' innovation behavior concentrated mostly on the field of psychology from the perspective of personal characteristics, and subsequent research focused gradually on the influence of external situational factors. As an important part of the external context, leadership plays an important role in corporate innovation. Leadership style and manner can directly or indirectly influence employees to demonstrate innovative behavior. Through empowerment, leaders can make employees feel the company's support and attention, which will lead to innovation behavior. Therefore, exploring how to improve employees' innovative behavior from the perspective of leadership is essential. However, most studies started only from the perspective of leadership style, such as transformational, authentic, service-oriented and ethical leadership, to explore the influence of leadership on employees' innovative behavior, and research on the effect of leadership empowerment on employees' innovation behavior is limited. Although studies showed that leadership empowerment has a positive influence on employees' innovation behavior, the action mechanism between the two factors is unclear. Does leadership empowerment directly or indirectly affect employees' innovation behavior? What other factors exist in this influence? Previous studies failed to confirm such issues in detail.

In addition, numerous studies revealed that thriving at work plays an important role in the innovation behavior of employees, but limited research incorporated leadership empowering behavior and thriving at work into research models and explored their influence on innovation behavior at the same time. Moreover, does this role exist in the context of Chinese high-tech enterprises? Is it a positive or negative regulation? Employees' innovation behavior is affected by not only the external leadership environment but also individual factors. Research at home and abroad showed that personal development support has a significant influence on employees' innovation behavior, but previous research failed to provide a clear answer on how this influence works. In addition, participative decision making was confirmed by a large number of studies to have an influence on the innovation behavior of employees within an enterprise, and delegation of authority typically emerges in the process of corporate management. Enterprises maintain an open attitude towards power appointment, which will create the power appointment management atmosphere, and employees' perception of a power appointment will have an influence on their innovation behavior.

Therefore, after defining the concepts of 'leadership empowerment' and 'employee innovation behavior', this study constructs a 'leadership empowering behavior–thriving at work–employee innovation behavior' research framework and introduces delegation of authority and participative decision making into the research framework. From the perspective of social cognition and empowerment theory, this study explores the influence path and mechanism of leadership empowerment on employees' innovation behavior and determines whether personal development support can effectively regulate the relationship between participative decision making and employees' innovation behavior. The conclusions of this study may have theoretical significance and guide management practice for research on employees' innovation behavior to help leaders inspire employees' innovation behavior and improve corporate innovation performance.

This paper is mainly divided into seven parts. The first section introduces the research background, significance and content of the influence of leaders' empowering behavior on employees' innovation behavior. The second section presents the literature review of research on employees' behaviors empowered by leaders, thriving at work and innovation behavior. The third section constructs the research model of the influencing factors of leadership empowering behavior and thriving at work for employees' innovation behavior and presents the research hypotheses. The fourth section systematically combs through the variables and measurement items included in the research model, describes the questionnaire and research methods and explains the data analysis techniques used in this research. The fifth section analyses the data of the collected valid questionnaires and draws the conclusions. The sixth section assesses and summarizes the research conclusions, and the seventh section identifies the research limitations and future research prospects.