Transformational leadership, innovative work behavior, and employee well-being

Abstract

Different studies have shown that transformational leadership, which is categorized as a positive leadership, can increase employee’s well-being and innovation. However, the research about the social interactional mechanism used to improve the aforementioned outcomes is scant. This research investigates the mediating roles of leader’s active empathetic listening and psychological safety through a survey data collected from 583 postgraduate management students in three top universities in Iran working either full-time or part-time. After doing a series of confirmatory factor analyses, this study employed structural equation modeling to test the hypotheses of the proposed model. Results of the analyses revealed that leader’s active empathetic listening and psychological safety fully mediated the influence of TL on innovative work behavior, and partially mediated the influence of TL on employee well-being. This paper contributes in three ways. First, it investigates the mediating roles of leader’s active empathetic listening and psychological safety as two interpersonal factors on innovative work behavior and employee well-being. Second, findings of the study make contributions to the body of research in a number of related disciplines, such as transformational leadership, employee well-being, and innovative work behavior. Third, this paper highlights the significant impact of listening as a taken-for-granted aspect of interactions in leader–follower relationship. Implications of the findings for research and practice are discussed.