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1. Introduction
The best way to achieve success is to set a bottom line (e.g. profits) that cannot be abandoned at all costs; however, this obsession with the bottom line led to numerous scandals. Leaders' pursuit of the bottom line is called BLM (Greenbaum et al., 2012). The literature found that leader BLM generates considerable benefits to firms (Zhang et al., 2021). However, China's economy shifted from the stage of high-speed growth to the stage of high-quality growth, and the blind pursuit of the bottom line may contradict the direction of China's economic development (Leutert, 2021). Therefore, in the Chinese context, examining leader BLM has certain theoretical and practical implications.
There are still limitations in studying leader BLM. Researchers explained how leader BLM influences subordinates' workplace cheating (Farasat et al., 2019), social undermining (Eissa et al., 2018) and unethical pro-organisational behaviour (Farasat and Azam, 2020) from the perspective of social cognitive theory (SCT). Studies also discussed the topics based on trait activation theory (Eissa et al., 2019), social learning theory (Zhang et al., 2021) and social information processing (Babalola et al., 2020). Recent research found that BLM plays a role in the social exchange relationship between employees and leaders (Babalola et al., 2021; Zhan and Liu, 2021). Scholars believed that leader BLM enhances the leader–member exchange relationship and generates positive results, such as employee task performance (Quade et al., 2020). Scholars also provided a perspective (social exchange) for understanding leader BLM; however, some dark boxes remain unilluminated. We doubt the argument that leader BLM strengthens and balances the social exchange relationship. Furthermore, the literature provided rare evidence explaining the hidden psychological factors affecting employees' behaviours (Quade et al., 2020). Consequently, using social exchange theory (SET), we try to illuminate how leader BLM breaks the social exchange relationship via a psychological mechanism.
Here, we focus on the influence of leader BLM on EI for the following reasons. First, employees are the main participants of innovation, and how to stimulate their innovation is the main agenda (Scott and Bruce, 1994; Wan and Liu, 2021). Second, the literature extended the effects of leader BLM to individuals' and organisations' constructive outcomes (Zhang et al., 2021). For example, some...