Empowering Leadership and Team Creativity: Understanding the Direct-Indirect Path

Abstract

This study investigated the relationship between empowering leadership and team creativity by integrating the theory of group behavior with componential theory of creativity. For this study, data was collected from two sources (343 Subordinates, 67 Supervisors) by temporally dividing data collection process into two points in time for independent, dependent, and mediating variables from employees of a bank operating in Pakistan. Random coefficient analysis technique was used with Mplus 7.0 to analyze nested data for preliminary analysis and analysis of mediation and indirect effects. Mediation was analyzed using the indirect effect of random models and further confirmed the confidence using bootstrapping procedure. Through this study, the researchers tried to explore the inconsistent relationship between empowering leadership behavior and team creativity. It was found that empowering leadership behavior affects the team level creativity of employees directly and indirectly through the mediation of team learning behavior and team psychological empowerment as team process and team emergent states respectively. The results indicated that empowering leadership enhances the learning potential of teams and team empowerment perception which in turn enhances team level creativity. Further research findings, implications, and future research directions also discussed in this research.

The Mediating Role of Information Sharing in the Relationship Between Empowering Leadership and Creativity in Teams

“…Previous studies have emphasized the relevance of leadership to creativity and team outcomes (Adeel, Batool, & Ali, 2018;Hon & Chan, 2013;Audenaert, & Decramer, 2016;Zhang, Chen, & Kwan, 2010). Self-determination theory (SDT) emphasize that creative teams work best when they have considerable autonomy and decision making ability (Deci & Ryan, 2012;Ryan & Deci, 2020).…”

Evaluation of Open Leadership and Innovation Orientation on Employees and Culture of the Organization

“…Characteristics expected to be in open leaders; is to accept the power of employees, to guide all kinds of processes and to accept the potential of the employees / service recipients to influence. In organizational culture, the importance of leadership style is seen in terms of reflecting the creativity activities of the employees to the process management (Adeel et al 2018). Especially in innovation-oriented organizations, the creativity activities of the employees are positively reflected in the performance.…”

Social Venture Leadership: Understanding Attributes and Processes for Innovation in Social Organizations

“…Thus, the interconnection modeling path confirmed its strong influence on team creativity and innovation in social ventures. Although the academic literature had already registered the connection between empowering leadership and team creativity (Cheong et al, 2019Adeel et al, 2018), as far as known, the mediators that enable this linkage were never presented as was proposed here.…”

“…Nevertheless, EL theory is particularly relevant to discuss preconditions that can foster creativity and innovation, both in the individual (Zhang, 2010) and team levels (Lee et al, 2018;Adeel et al, 2018;Hon & Chan, 2013). For example, exploring alternatives, self-belief, autonomy, and intrinsic motivation are attributes that promote creativity, and EL features are closely related to contextual factors relevant to the creative process (Lee et al, 2018;Amabile et al, 2004).…”

“…Empirical research on EL has presented evidence that it fosters creativity and innovation both at the individual (Zhang, 2010) and team levels (Lee et al, 2018;Adeel et al, 2018;Hon & Chan, 2013).…”