The Influence of Differential Leadership on Employees’ Affective Commitment: A Perspective of the Insiders and Outsiders

Article history Received: 15 May 2020 Accepted: 18 May 2020 Published Online: 31 May 2020 From the perspective of the insiders and outsiders, this study explores the influence of differential leadership on employees’ affective commitment and the moderating effect of leader’s self-enhancing humor and individual traditionality. The results show that the differential leadership has a positive impact on the organizational affective commitment of employees, the leader’s self-enhancing humor and the employees’ traditionality play a positive regulatory role respectively. Moreover, compared with the outsiders, the low traditionality has a stronger influence on the relationship between differential leadership and organizational affective commitment of the insiders. This paper enriches the research on the influence of leadership style on employee’s affective commitment, proposes and verifies the moderation of leader’s self-enhancing humor and employee’s traditionality, which complements the boundary conditions for the effectiveness of differential leadership style.