Does manager with E-leadership inspire employee creativity?—A Study on moderating role of promoting regulatory focus and preventing regulatory focus.

Purpose — This paper examines the mediating effects of emotional exhaustion and the moderating role of promoting regulatory focus and preventing regulatory focus. Exploring the relationship between emotional exhaustion and the personal trait of regulatory focus in E-Leadership and employee creativity. Design/methodology/approach — This study adopted a questionnaire survey method and collected 366 samples. Hierarchical regression analysis and bootstrap method were performed using SPSS 27.0 to test the research hypotheses. Findings— The findings showed that:1.E-leadership negatively affects employees' emotional exhaustion.2.E-leadership positively influences employees' creativity. 3.Emotional exhaustion negatively affects employees' creativity. 4.Promoting regulatory focus moderates the negative relationship between E-leadership and Emotional exhaustion.5.Prevention regulatory focus moderates the negative relationship between emotional exhaustion and employee creativity. Originality/value— This study enriches the research on the influence mechsanism between E-leadership and employee creativity, and also provides references for leadership practices in the digital age. However, the research has some limitations such as using only cross-sectional data and limited representativeness of the sample. Future studies could consider collecting multi-wave data, expanding the sample size, incorporating other influencing factors, etc. to enhance the rigor of the research.