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NTU Management Review Vol. 33 No. 2 Aug. 2023

EML has been regarded as supportive leadership that provides direction to members,
treats them fairly, and views employees’ investments as valuable (Ahearne et al., 2005).
From the perspective of social exchange theory, this stimulates adherence to norms of
reciprocity and elicits increased obligations to engage in work (Rich et al., 2010). As such,
employees may perceive work innovation as an important way to reciprocate team leaders’
support. Previous research confirms empowered employees understand their duties and
achievement targets (Kearney et al., 2019; Schilpzand, Houston, and Cho, 2018).

In line with organizational behavior literature, an employee with higher felt
obligation is more likely to feel intrinsic work motivation and task satisfaction, and to
concern about products or services quality (Eisenberger et al., 2001; Thompson, Bergeron,
and, Bolino, 2020). Eisenberger et al. (2010) argue such belief is critical to employees’
discretionary and extra-role behaviors. Empirical research has also confirmed the role of
felt obligation as a critical psychological mechanism improving employees’ willingness
to perform behaviors that benefit the organization (Liang, Farh, and Farh, 2012). For

example, employees are willing to make additional efforts to solve problems, suggest
improvements, remove unnecessary procedures, and/or adopt more effective work
methods, as these activities will benefit the organization (Morrison and Phelps, 1999;
van Dyne and LePine, 1998). Previous research has also found that the employees who
are given some power role by a leader would express feelings of trust and obligation that
leads to a desire to reciprocate, which results in greater willingness to engage in extra-
role performance (Vidyarthi, Liden, Anand, Erdogan, and Ghosh, 2010). Accordingly, we
propose the following hypothesis:
Hypothesis 2: Felt obligation mediates the positive relationships between EML and

innovation intention.

2.4 TMX → Value Congruence → Innovation Intention
The relationship quality between an individual team member and his/her fellow
team members is captured by TMX (Seers, 1989). Kamdar and van Dyne (2007) argue
that TMX, due to its high-quality peer relationships, can be described by flexibility,
discretion, and open-endedness. Intrinsically, TMX is a social exchange-based relationship

characterized by reciprocity, honesty, support, and exchange of information (Banks,
Batchelor, Seers, O’Boyle, Pollack, and Gower, 2014). Specifically, TMX represents
individual’s perceptions of “the reciprocity between a member and his or her team with
respect to the member’s contribution of ideas, feedback, and assistance to other members

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