The curvilinear impact of inclusive leadership on employees’ innovative behavior: The roles of tacit knowledge sharing and work tenure

While previous studies highlight the significance of leadership styles in shaping employees’ innovative behavior, the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Integrating social exchange theory and knowledge creation theory, this study examines the impacts of inclusive leadership and tacit knowledge sharing on employees’ innovative behavior, with tacit knowledge sharing as a mediator and work tenure as a moderator. This study adopted a questionnaire survey method to collect valid sample data from 283 employees in Chinese enterprises, and used hierarchical regression to test the hypotheses. The results show that inclusive leadership has an inverted U-shaped impact on employees’ innovative behavior. Tacit knowledge sharing also exerts an inverted U-shaped effect on employees’ innovative behavior and mediates the relationship between inclusive leadership and employees’ innovative behavior. Additionally, work tenure positively moderates the relationship between inclusive leadership and employees’ innovative behavior, while negatively moderating the relationship between inclusive leadership and tacit knowledge sharing. Overall, these findings enrich the theoretical understanding of the relationship between inclusive leadership and employees’ innovative behavior and provide valuable managerial implications for promoting employees’ innovative behavior.