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.
Highlights
In the contemporary, dynamic, and competitive marketplace, organizations need to exploit their potential to enhance their ability to produce more creative solutions for survival (e.g., Erdogan et al 2015, Cho and Pucik 2005)
In this research building on the framework of the theory of group behavior (Wegner 1987) and componential theory of creativity (Amabile 1996), we proposed here that empowering leadership behavior as an important factor to foster the creativity of work teams by affecting the learning behavior of the teams and team psychological empowerment
We suggested here that empowering leadership behavior positively relate to team learning behavior and psychological empowerment which are further related to group level creativity at organizations
Summary
Dynamic, and competitive marketplace, organizations need to exploit their potential to enhance their ability to produce more creative solutions for survival (e.g., Erdogan et al 2015, Cho and Pucik 2005). Team level research of creativity suggested that individuals in teams bring diversified knowledge, skills, and expertise to produce more creative solutions (e.g., Taggar 2001, Zhou and George 2003). Leaders’ behavior is one of the most investigated behaviors in creativity research; researchers found that leaders can affect the potential of individuals and teams for creativity (e.g., Druskat and Wheeler 2003, D’Innocenzo et al 2016, DeConinck and DeConinck 2017, Ng 2017). Among these studied behaviors, empowering leadership behavior has been given special attention in management literature. Equivocal results found in literature about the relationship between empowering leadership and creativity of employees
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