Abstract:    The digital revolution not only drives the transformation revolution of enterprises, but also push the digital transformation revolution of leadership behavior. However, existing literature mainly discusses the formation mechanism of digital leadership from a "top-down" perspective, while neglect the "bottom-up" reversal influence of employees. Considering that employees in the digital age are more innovative and have potential to exert reversal influence on their supervisor, it leaves open the possibility that employee innovative behavior could improve digital leadership, which will be a breakthrough path for enterprises to deal with the dilemma of "how to transform traditional leadership into digital leadership". Based on the Social Information Processing Theory, this study conducted an analysis on 286 leader-employee two-wave pairing questionnaire obtained from enterprises with digital transformation in South China. The results showed that: (1)when leader′s bottom-line mentality is low, employee innovative behavior can improve the digital leadership; when leader′s bottom-line mentality is high, the relationship is not significant; (2) when employee′s bottom-line mentality is low, digital leadership positively influence employee innovative behavior; when employee′s bottom-line mentality is high, the relationship is not significant; (3) when both leader and employee have a low-level bottom-line mentality, employee innovative behavior would promote leader to actively conduct digital leadership behavior, and then digital leadership would further encourage employee to actively engage in innovation, thus realizing a "incremental effect" of employee innovation. Breaking away from the usual top-down perspective in existing leader behavior research, this study has theoretically expanded people′s understanding on the formation and influence process of digital leadership, and it will practically provide reference on solving the dilemma of traditional leader transforming to digital leadership.

Key words:  digital leadership, employee innovative behavior, bottomline mentality, reversal influence