Moderators of the Relationship Between Leadership Style and Employee Creativity: The Role of Task Novelty and Personal Initiative

Abstract

Transformational leadership is supposed to enhance employees' creativity. However, results of meta-analytic research on the relationships between transformational leadership and creativity fell short of expectations. In addition, the coefficients showed a huge variability. In this study, it was argued that relevant task and employee characteristics have been neglected in previous research. The benefit of transformational leadership may be limited in a context with routine tasks. Therefore, the moderating effects of task novelty and personal initiative on the relationship between transformational and transactional leadership and creativity were examined. In an experimental setting, 241 undergraduate students were instructed to act like a trainee of a management consulting company and to generate ideas. The results largely supported the hypotheses. Transformational leadership led to higher creativity than transactional leadership, and high task novelty produced higher creativity than low task novelty. As predicted, the effect of transformational leadership on creativity was stronger when task novelty was high than when task novelty was low. Moreover, the effect of transformational leadership was higher when persons were high in personal initiative than when they were low in personal initiative, indicating that the influence of transformational leadership depends on task and follower characteristics. Implications for practice and future research are discussed.