In an increasingly complex and dynamic external environment, organizations can adapt to the development of knowledge economy only if they constantly engage in innovation. Numerous studies have shown that employee creativity is the basis of organizational innovation and competitiveness. However, the reality is often unsatisfactory. Because creative activities are both risky and uncertain, most employees usually choose routine methods to maintain their current working status, which results in the stagnation of the overall innovation ability of enterprises. How to effectively stimulate employee creativity has become an important problem that needs to be solved urgently in practice. As an important aspect of organizational environment, leadership has an important impact on employee creativity. However, different leadership styles have different effects on employee creativity. With organizations facing such contradictions as centralization and decentralization, low cost and differentiation, flexibility and control, the previous leadership mode that followed the "two-in-one" logic thinking has been unable to effectively deal with external environment. Paradoxical leadership is a kind of leadership mode which synthetically uses "both-and" paradoxical thinking to meet organizational structure and subordinate needs, and to integrate and coordinate the handling of contradictions. It makes up for the traditional way of leadership which emphasizes trade-offs too much. It can effectively deal with the contradictions in the organization, and ensure a good match between leadership behavior and complex situations. Based on this, this study intends to further explore how paradoxical leadership can stimulate employee creativity.

In addition, this study chooses team external network as a mediating variable to examine its mediating effect in the relationship between paradoxical leadership and employee creativity. Previous studies have found that individual-level relationship networks have a significant impact on employee creativity by influencing individuals′ ability and opportunity to access heterogeneous resources and information, but relatively neglect the role of network relationships embedded by team members in the process of influencing employee innovation activities. Team external network, as a unique way to allocate resources and capabilities, can effectively promote the improvement of employee creativity. At the same time, this study will further examine the boundary effect of mediocre thinking style in the internal impact mechanism of paradoxical leadership on employee creativity. It is found that individual specific cognitive attitudes and thinking styles play an important contingency role in the influence of leadership style on employee creativity. That is to say, in the process of indirect effect of paradoxical leadership acting on employee creativity through team external network, employee′s mediocre thinking style may be an important individual characteristic variable, which can intervene in the process. 

This paper builds a multilevel moderated mediation model in order to explore the mediating role of team external network on the relationship between paradoxical leadership and employee creativity from the perspective of social network and tests the moderating effect of mediocre thinking on the relationship between team external network and employee creativity, and the indirect effect of paradoxical leadership on employee creativity through team external network. SPSS22.0, Liserl8.5, Mplus6.11 and HLM6.08 were used for statistical analysis. Specifically, this study used SPSS22.0 for reliability analysis and descriptive statistical analysis, Liserl8.5 for confirmatory factor analysis, Mplus 6.11 and HLM6.08 for testing research hypothesis.

Based on the matched field data from 51 supervisors and 175 employees, the results of data analysis revealed that paradoxical leadership has significantly positive effect on employee creativity. Team external network mediates the relationship between paradoxical leadership and employee creativity. Moreover, mediocre thinking style positively moderates the relation between team external network and employee creativity, and it also moderates the indirect effect of paradoxical leadership on employee creativity through team external network.

This study provides three main theoretical contributions. Firstly, this study constructs and validates the cross-level mediation effect mechanism of paradoxical leadership, team external network and employee creativity. Research conclusion echoes scholars′ proposals to strengthen the study of paradoxical leadership mechanism, enriching and supplementing the theoretical perspective of the relationship between leadership and employee creativity. Secondly, By introducing the mediocre thinking style variable in traditional culture, this study clarifies the boundary conditions of external team network influencing employee creativity. This study takes full account of the Chinese situation, clarifies the situational factors of the relationship between team external network and employee creativity, and clarifies the boundary conditions for the effectiveness of team external network. At the end, this study clarifies the cross-level regulatory mechanism of employee′s mediocre thinking style on the impact of paradoxical leadership on employee creativity through the team external network. This study echoes the cross-level boundary mechanism proposed by scholars to explore the effectiveness of paradoxical leadership from the aspects of individual characteristics, and deepens our understanding of the relationship mechanism between paradoxical leadership and employee creativity. 

The conclusion of this study has certain guiding significance for the management practice of Chinese enterprises. Firstly, enterprises can train managers′ paradoxical leadership skills, and when recruiting, selecting and evaluating managers, whether they have "paradoxical integration" thinking will be an important evaluation index. Secondly, successful enterprises tend to rely more on the frequency of knowledge and information flow, which requires leaders to take timely interventions to break through the limitations of communication within the team and facilitate more cross-border activities for employees. Finally, team leaders need to implement different management methods for different types of employees. For employees with low mediocre thinking style, managers can promote employees to adapt to the organizational environment and stimulate their positive behavior by cultivating their median concept of overall thinking and harmonious coexistence with others; for employees with high mediocre thinking style, they are urged to continue to maintain and develop. In summary, the results show that paradoxical leadership should attach importance to the role of team external network in the process of promoting employee creativity, guide enterprises to cultivate employee′s mediocre thinking, and enhance the innovation ability of enterprises.