The Influence of Leaders’ Stewardship Behavior on Innovation Success: The Mediating Effect of Radical Innovation

Abstract

As stated by previous researchers, in an increasingly competitive environment, organizations need to develop successful innovations to compete and survive in the long term. Furthermore, sustainability and social issues are gaining increasing importance, to the extent that they are now a matter of high concern for firms and for society. Therefore, organizations cannot improve their results at any price and must be responsible for the consequences of their activities, including innovation. In these conditions, a growing demand for new leadership styles and behaviors arises to face this complex context. Stewardship is a leadership behavior that shows great concern for the impact of the organization’s activity on society. A quantitative study has been conducted with the purpose of providing empirical evidence of the relationship between leaders’ stewardship behavior and innovation success, using radical innovation as an explanatory variable. To confirm the hypotheses, structural equations were used on a dataset from a sample of 300 questionnaires from Spanish companies. The study empirically validates the proposed conceptual model. Results show how radical innovation fully mediates the relationship between leaders’ stewardship behavior and innovation success.