Are Employees Passive Receivers or Active Seekers of Inclusive Leadership? The Moderating Role of Relational Attribution

Current research on inclusive leadership has predominantly premised employees as passive recipients, leaving a critical gap in understanding how and when inclusive leadership shapes employees’ responses from an interactive perspective – one that highlights the interplay between leader behavior and employee individual differences. Drawing on attribution theory, this study introduces an interactive perspective to examine how inclusive leadership interacts with employees’ relational attributions to trigger a responsive affective-based process comprising affective trust and affective commitment, which ultimately enhances job performance. Data from a three-wave, multi-source survey of 297 employee-supervisor dyads in the Chinese hospitality industry validated the proposed model. The findings confirm that inclusive leadership boosts job performance via the sequential mediation of affective trust and affective commitment. Moreover, relational attributions moderate the initial trust-building stage, theoretically highlighting employees’ active role in co-creating leadership outcomes. Practically, this affirms that relationship-focused leadership, which addresses needs for belongingness and uniqueness, is key to fostering trust and enhancing performance.