The Relationship between Female Leadership Traits and Employee Innovation Performance—The Mediating Role of Knowledge Sharing

The arrival of the new economic era, especially the rapid development of the Internet era, provides a broader platform for the development of women; women leaders can be seen in various fields. The improvement of female leadership status makes more scholars pay attention to the development and improvement of female leadership and leadership style, but few scholars study the influence of female leadership characteristics on employee innovation performance. This paper innovatively starts from female leadership, studies the relationship between female leadership characteristics and employee innovation performance, and takes knowledge sharing as an intermediary variable. This paper first uses flexible management theory, leadership style theory and caring ethics theory to construct the theoretical research model of this paper, and proposes four major hypotheses by sorting out the relationships among female leadership characteristics, knowledge sharing, and employee innovation performance. Secondly, a questionnaire suitable for this study was developed, and an empirical analysis was conducted by using SPSS, AMOS, and other software after 313 valid questionnaires were collected. The research conclusions of this paper are as follows: the characteristics of female leadership help employees to actively share knowledge within the organization; female leadership characteristics contribute to the improvement of employee innovation performance; and knowledge sharing plays a good mediating role in the improvement of employee innovation performance by female leadership traits. This paper enriches the research on leadership, especially female leadership, and provides a powerful supplement and explanation to the research on innovation. In addition, the research conclusions of this paper provide a new perspective on the leadership characteristics required by the enterprise for female leaders, and provide direction support for the sustainable development of female leaders in the enterprise.