How Leader Identification Promotes Upward Ingratiation: A Relational Identification Theory Perspective

Ingratiation is one of the hot topics in enterprise human resource management research. Over these years, researchers in this field have called for work examining how the relationship between leaders and employees impacts employees’ upward ingratiation. To delve into the importance of relationalism in the leader-employee relationship, particularly in Chinese culture, we focused on the key predictive role of leader identification. Based on relational identification theory, a dual-mediator model with leader-follower value congruence and subordinate moqi was constructed to investigate the internal mechanism. Data was collected from 527 Chinese employees across various industries through questionnaires and processed through Amos and Process macro. The results showed that both leader-follower value congruence and subordinate moqi positively mediate the positive relationship between leader identification and upward ingratiation. The study enriches our knowledge of the antecedents of upward ingratiation in the Chinese context and provides theoretical guidance for leaders to understand employees’ upward ingratiation.