Leadership, creativity, and innovation: A critical review and practical recommendations

Abstract

Leadership is a key predictor of employee, team, and organizational creativity and innovation. Research in this area holds great promise for the development of intriguing theory and impactful policy implications, but only if empirical studies are conducted rigorously. In the current paper, we report a comprehensive review of a large number of empirical studies (N = 195) exploring leadership and workplace creativity and innovation. Using this article cache, we conducted a number of systematic analyses and built narrative arguments documenting observed trends in five areas. First, we review and offer improved definitions of creativity and innovation. Second, we conduct a systematic review of the main effects of leadership upon creativity and innovation and the variables assumed to moderate these effects. Third, we conduct a systematic review of mediating variables. Fourth, we examine whether the study designs commonly employed are suitable to estimate the causal models central to the field. Fifth, we conduct a critical review of the creativity and innovation measures used, noting that most are sub-optimal. Within these sections, we present a number of taxonomies that organize the extant research, highlight understudied areas, and serve as a guide for future variable selection. We conclude by highlighting key suggestions for future research that we hope will reorient the field and improve the rigour of future research such that we can build more reliable and useful theories and policy recommendations.

Servant leadership: A meta‐analytic examination of incremental contribution, moderation, and mediation

“…Eva et al (2018) also point to an over-reliance on self-report, single-time point studies within the SL field; suggesting this type of design limits the ability to interpret the findings from the literature. This includes the use of experimental studies, longitudinal designs, and instrumental variables (Antonakis et al, 2010;Hughes et al, 2018). The first involves collecting SL and the criterion variable from different sources (i.e., the leader and follower).…”

How to build your team for innovation? A cross‐level mediation model of team personality, team climate for innovation, creativity, and job crafting

“…Although most scholars have used creativity and innovation interchangeably and considered that innovation subsumes creativity (Anderson & West, ; Anderson et al ., ; Chen et al ., ; Hülsheger et al ., ), a few scholars have conceptualized creativity as the process of generating creative ideas and innovation as the process of implementing these ideas (Hughes, Lee, Tian, Newman, & Legood, ). That is, some scholars do not conceptualize creativity as a subprocess of innovation.…”

Beyond relationship quality: The role of leader–member exchange importance in leader–follower dyads

“…Our findings thus highlight the importance of future research aiming to compare distinct theoretical pathways within the same study. Doing so can start to address recent calls for leadership researchers to simultaneously examine multiple mediators to tease apart the relative effects of competing theoretical explanations (Fischer et al ., ; Hughes et al ., ).…”

“…Studies comparing multiple pathways, concurrently are rare (e.g., Walumbwa, Cropanzano, & Goldman, ). This is an issue in the wider leadership literature, which tends to assess a single leader variable and a single mediator (e.g., Fischer et al ., ; Hughes, Lee, Tian, Newman, & Legood, ). Such designs make it impossible to assess whether leadership produces effects via multiple paths or whether certain mediators are redundant when included alongside competing mediating variables.…”