Abstract
The leadership literature has provided growing evidence regarding the power of leadership in facilitating follower creativity. Despite these advances, a noticeable omission in this body of research is humble leadership. The study extends previous research by developing a cross-level moderated mediation model and examining the roles that psychological safety and knowledge sharing may play in the relationship between humble leadership and follower creativity. Using a time-lagged data of 328 team members nested within 106 teams, the results show that: (a) psychological safety mediates the relationship between humble leadership and follower creativity; (b) knowledge sharing moderates the relationship between psychological safety and follower creativity; and (c) the indirect influence of humble leadership on follower creativity through psychological safety is stronger when knowledge sharing is high.
Highlights
Creativity, defined as the generation of new ideas, has become increasingly critical for organizational performance, survival and success (Anderson et al, 2014)
Drawing on social information processing theory, we argue that psychological safety may work as a mediator in the relationship between humble leadership and follower creativity
Considering that the exchange of knowledge is a valuable source of creative ideas (Carmeli and Paulus, 2015), we argue that knowledge sharing may moderate the positive influence of psychological safety on follower creativity
Summary
Creativity, defined as the generation of new ideas, has become increasingly critical for organizational performance, survival and success (Anderson et al, 2014). Reflecting the importance of creativity, the past decades have witnessed an upsurge of research interest in identifying factors that contribute to creativity Most of these studies have stressed that certain leadership styles, such as transformational, empowering, servant, shared, and authentic leaderships, can positively influence follower creativity. There has been an increasing recognition that leader humility is critical to organizational effectiveness, but only more recently have leadership researchers begun to empirically examine the influence of humble leadership on follower attitudes and behaviors, such as job satisfaction (Owens et al, 2013; Ou et al, 2017), psychological empowerment (Jeung and Yoon, 2016), and job engagement (Owens et al, 2013). To extend this line of research, this study seeks to understand how and when humble leadership influences follower creativity
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