Abstract:  In recent years, much attention has been given to understanding employee innovation. With intensive competition and unpredictable technology changes, increasing number of organizations realize that coaching is a key element to help employees to get competitive advantage and an important prerequisite for employees promote their innovation behavior. Supervisory coaching behavior was regarded as an important antecedent of employee innovation behavior, but there has been no profound study on these relationships and influences. Moreover, promoting innovation requires extensive and effortful cognitive processing. This requirement is magnified further by the complex, ambiguous situations in which most organizational problems occur. Employees must define a diverse set of alternative solutions. Innovation necessitates that this activity is completed effectively. It is unlikely, therefore, that innovation outcomes will be realized without a large degree of support from organizations and organizational coaches. To provide this support, supervisory coaching must understand the cognitive requirements of innovation. Regrettably, it is unclear whether there is a positive relationship between supervisory coaching and employee innovation. In view of the existing research gaps, this paper constructs a mediated moderation model based on the cognition theory to test how supervisory coaching behavior facilitate and promote employee innovation.
Moreover, many studies have showed that employee innovation has been considered as a critical factor of organizational continuous innovation and breakthrough, as a consequence, how to improve employee innovation isone of the important problems in theory and practice circles. This paper proposes and testes a moderated mediation model in which supervisory coaching and critical thinking influence employee innovation. To test the model, data were collected from 267 dyads of employees and their immediate leaders. Of 267 participants, 60.7% were male, 39.3% were female. From age structure to see, of 51.3% employees under the age of 30, it means that young people are in the majority. In term of the education, 61.4% have bachelors’ degrees or lower degrees.
The regression analysis results show that: (1) critical thinking partially mediates the relationship between supervisory coaching behavior and employee innovation; (2) perceived leader support for innovation moderates the relationship between critical thinking and employee innovation; (3) the moderating role of perceived leader support for innovation on the relationship between supervisory coaching behavior and employee innovation is partly mediated by critical thinking.
This article reviewed the relevant literature onemployee innovation and suggested how supervisory coaching behavior may facilitate and promote employee innovation by influencing the critical thinking as a cognitive process. This paper was not intended as a comprehensive review of all the factors that may influence employee innovation. Rather, we used the employee innovation as a guide, reviewing the factors that may affect critical thinking as a cognitive process that must be engaged in to solve innovation, and how supervisory coaching behavior can help encourage this process in their subordinates. Our discussion of the cognitive processes necessary for innovation implied a somewhat linear progression, it should be noted that most cognitive models of innovation suggest a more cyclical approach where the innovation solver may return to pervious processes if needed. While the outcomes of process occurring early on will determine the effectiveness of later process, it is possible to return to critical thinking and make corrections at any point in the employee innovation. Recognizing that critical thinking may be necessary and encouraging employees to do so, as well as encouraging employees to make changes based on this process is another way a supervisory coaching may facilitate employee innovation.
The conclusions contribute to the literature in several ways. First, this paper offers a new approach to the influence of supervisory coaching by examining employee innovation. Specifically, while researchers have long pointed to the significance of cognitive process in enhancing innovation, in this paper we sought to provide a more parsimonious way to assess critical thinking. In so doing, we were able to determine that critical thinking is important in contributing to employee innovation. The results indicate thatsupervisory coaching behavior who model and encourage critical thinking. Importantly, our findings indicate that supervisory coaching behavior and critical thinking are both important contributors to an enhanced capacity for innovation. Second, the results concerning the moderating effect of perceived leader support for innovation on the relationship between supervisory coaching and employee innovation contribute to the integration of cognition theory. To sum up, this study deepens our understanding of supervisory coaching behavior by examining the mediating effect of critical thinking and moderating effect of perceived leader support for innovation in one theoretical framework.
The paper also provides some implications for human resource management. First, the lend support to previous work showing that critical thinking may be beneficial for engagement in cognitive processes associated with employee innovation. Second, the results of this paper indicate thatsupervisory coaching behavior facilitate employee critical thinking, so coach selection may include a way to assess a coach’s attitudes toward critical thinking.
This paper is not without limitations, and thus its findings must be interpreted with caution. Although we provided theoretical reasoning for our model, the extent to which cause-effect relationships may be inferred is limited. It could be claimed that individual who have a high innovation ability are likely to take on critical thinking than those who possess low-level capacities of critical thinking. Similar to the extant body of leadership that uses the same approach as in this paper for assessingsupervisory coaching behavior, we do not know what additional factors influence employees’ perception of coaching behavior. Therefore, one could speculate that individual who are willing to and critically thinking. Another important issue that has not been addressed in this paper is that of team innovation. The current studies focus on individual innovation. However, the interest in team innovation has increased in recent years. Testing the role of supervisory coaching behavior and critical thinking on team innovation is valuable to our understanding of these constructs and their influence on innovation. Future studies should evaluate the construct at a team level, adding to our understanding of the multilevel nature of innovation in organizations. The last important one is that the paper only examines the corporations in China, cautions should be exercised in generalizing our findings to other countries.

Key words: supervisory coaching, critical thinking, perceived leader support for innovation, employee innovation