Abstract
The main objective of this research was to examine how transformational leaders boost their followers’ innovative work behavior through trust in a leader, empowerment, and work engagement. Data were collected from 281 multinational organization employees in China. The Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) macro process was utilized to test the proposed hypothesis. The findings revealed that transformational leadership and work engagement were significantly related to innovative work behavior. The findings also demonstrated the significant impact of transformational leadership on trust in a leader, and its subsequent positive impact on the work engagement of the employees. Furthermore, the results supported a significant serial mediation between transformational leadership, trust, work engagement, and employees’ innovative behavior. The results also showed a significant moderating effect of empowerment on transformational leadership and innovative work behavior. For boosting employees’ innovative work behavior, leaders in the organization should strive to engage them effectively in their work by gaining their trust, which could help them participate in creative activities. This is the key study to investigate the different perspectives of how transformational leadership can stimulate followers’ innovative behavior through trust in the leader and work engagement within the Chinese organizational context.
Highlights
Human performance is one of the triple bottom line dimensions, alongside the economic and environmental dimensions, which organizations today are striving to achieve in order to ensure organizational sustainability [1,2]
The significant relationship between transformational leadership and trust is well recognized in existing research [43,71,72,73,74,75], some researchers [65] still insist on further investigating the relationship between transformational leadership and trust in leaders. This study addressed this concern using the social exchange theory, from the perspective of Tepper et al [76], who reported trust in a leader as an outcome that belongs to between-person correlates of transformational leadership
Based on social exchange theory (SET), we argue that transformational leaders have certain characteristics that instill trust in the leadership among employees [43,71,72,73,74,75], which leads them to feel more engaged in their work [85,90], and they will exhibit more innovative work behavior at the workplace [90,99,100]
Summary
Human performance is one of the triple bottom line dimensions, alongside the economic and environmental dimensions, which organizations today are striving to achieve in order to ensure organizational sustainability [1,2]. Innovative work behavior (IWB) is an important employee outcome that is related to the human dimension of organizational sustainability. Innovative work behavior (IWB) is an important factor that management scholars need to consider, significantly, in order to gain a competitive advantage [4] and establish organizational sustainability. Along with the consequences of transformational leadership, the existing research has reported empowerment [35,36,37], work engagement [38], and trust [39,40] as significant predictors of innovative work behavior. To foster innovative work behavior among employees, organizational leaders need to consider the trust in leaders and work engagement as the most important factors linking transformational leadership and innovative work behavior. Whereas our second contribution is to investigate situations where empowerment moderates the relationship between transformational leadership and innovative work behavior
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