From Ethical Leadership to Team Creativity: The Mediating Role of Shared Leadership and the Moderating Effect of Leader–Member Exchange Differentiation

Jue Wang,Byung-Jik Kim,Hae-Ryong Kim

doi:10.3390/su132011280

Abstract

Alongside ethical leadership’s effectiveness on team creativity, the superiority of shared leadership has been emphasized in the literature. Based on role theory, social information processing theory, and allocation preferences theory, this study suggests that shared leadership functions as a critical intermediating mechanism to explain the influence of ethical leadership on team-level creativity. Moreover, the dispersion value of leader–member exchange (LMXD) moderates the influence of ethical leadership on shared leadership. To empirically test our hypotheses, this paper used multisource samples and team-level data with moderated mediation model with PLS-SEM method. This study targeted a sample of 30 leaders and 233 team members who work at HRD Korea where a team structure is utilized. The results of structural equation modeling showed that ethical leadership increased shared leadership, and ethical leadership and shared leadership both positively affected team creativity. Shared leadership functioned as a crucial mediating factor in the ethical leadership–team creativity link. Moreover, the team-level LMXD moderated ethical leadership effectiveness on creativity via shared leadership.

Highlights

Seung Yeon Son and Eunmi JangIn the rapidly changing modern business environment, organizations constantly seek to resolve the puzzle of the emergence of creativity to survive and grow [1,2]
Based on the role-making perspective [33], we propose that ethical leadership may enhance the level of shared leadership, so increased shared leadership would boost the degree of creativity members and teams [27,28,34]
We suggest that the influence of ethical leadership on shared leadership may be moderated by the group level of dispersion of the leader–member exchange (LMXD), which may influence the leadership effectiveness

Summary

Introduction

Seung Yeon Son and Eunmi JangIn the rapidly changing modern business environment, organizations constantly seek to resolve the puzzle of the emergence of creativity to survive and grow [1,2]. This paper focuses on leadership by relying on the suggestion of previous works that leadership greatly influences members’ creative group processes [6,8,9,10]. Considering the critical impacts of corporate ethics [11], we investigate the influence of ethical leadership. An ethical leader both performs personal moral behaviors and builds social relationships to facilitate ethical conduct among employees [12]. Works on ethical leadership have demonstrated that this leadership style helps enhance the quality of employee perception, attitudes, behaviors, and group-level outcomes [13,14,15]

Objectives

Methods

Discussion

Conclusion