Leadership and Creativity

Overview of Findings

Our study explores the relationship of entrepreneurial leadership with team and employee creativity as well as the mechanism of creative efficacy beliefs by adopting a multilevel perspective. As expected, entrepreneurial leadership strongly predicts creativity at both the team and individual levels, which is mediated by creative self- and team efficacies. Additionally, we found a cross-level mediation whereby team creative efficacy mediates the entrepreneurial leadership-employee creativity relation.

Theoretical Implications

The primary objective of this study is to examine the potential of entrepreneurial leadership to serve as a distinct leadership style that contributes to individual and team creativity. Antonakis and Autio note that entrepreneurial leadership and its relationship with workforce creativity is a research area that should be investigated more deeply. Entrepreneurial leadership can play a critical role in situations where a creative and innovative workforce is required. Although previous studies investigate entrepreneurial leadership and its beneficial effects, these studies mainly consider the leaders' entrepreneurial role. Entrepreneurial leadership, as a distinctive leadership style, and this style's relationship with desirable workplace outcomes require further research. We still have only a limited understanding of how entrepreneurial leadership may stimulate employees' creativity. Following Renko et al.'s conceptualization of entrepreneurial leadership, we argue that this style enables a firm to be more entrepreneurial by motivating employee creativity. Our study empirically extends the understanding of the role of a specific entrepreneurial leadership style in organizational behaviour research at a micro-level.

Further exploring the issue of distinctiveness of entrepreneurial leadership, our study empirically supports the notion that "creativity and entrepreneurship are inseparable". Specifically, we empirically measure a relative and specific contribution of entrepreneurial leadership to the creativity of employees as well as teams. Our findings indicate that entrepreneurial leadership outperforms transformational leadership in predicting employee and team creativity. This provides creditable evidence to support the notion that the compatibility principle can serve as an explanation for this positive influence of entrepreneurial leadership on workplace creativity. That is, entrepreneurial leadership may stimulate employees' feelings of being more compatible with their leader and organizational goals. Our study proposes that the specific outcome of entrepreneurial leadership can be further specified and measured in terms of individual and team creativity. Moreover, based on insights into entrepreneurial leadership studies, the theoretical argument could be developed that entrepreneurial leadership should take a more prominent place among existing and more deeply researched leadership styles. Since many leadership theories have largely remained stagnant for the past two decades, a growing number of scholars in leadership-performance research have recently questioned the effectiveness of these leadership styles in predicting desirable employee outcomes. They have found empirical redundancy and suggest that a new, contemporary leadership style may outperform traditional leadership approaches in predicting specific creative performance. While it is beyond the scope of this paper to settle the scholarly debate with regard to potentially differentiating entrepreneurial leadership from other well-researched leadership styles (e.g. transformational leadership), it is important to recognize that our empirical examinations highlight the relevance of an entrepreneurial leadership style in organizations where creativity is critically considered to achieve entrepreneurial goals. That is, our examination regarding the possible influence of entrepreneurial leadership on individual and team creativity adds to the growing recognition of entrepreneurial leadership as a specific leadership style that nurtures workforce creativity.

We examine creative efficacy beliefs as a mediator of the entrepreneurial leadership-creativity relationship. Applying SCT in leadership-creativity research, our findings concerning the benefits of entrepreneurial leadership for creative self- and team efficacies stress the importance of entrepreneurial leaders in terms of motivating workplace employees to develop their efficacy beliefs. Thus, we respond to the urgent calls for the investigation of intervening mechanisms by showing that entrepreneurial leadership influences creativity through a motivational mechanism. Emphasizing that creative efficacy beliefs mediate entrepreneurial leadership-creativity relations, our research confirms that entrepreneurial leaders building confidence can generate employee can-do motivation and lead to creative outcomes. Notably, consistent with prior research attributing employee responses to entrepreneurial leadership, our findings highlight the significant role of entrepreneurial leadership in nurturing the development of employee efficacy. Scholars have identified that entrepreneurial leaders should be considered as playing an important role in building their employees' beliefs in their own entrepreneurial skills and abilities with regard to innovation and creativity. However, empirical evidence in this regard is still lacking. Our study extends the efficacy belief in entrepreneurial leadership research by establishing the contribution of entrepreneurial leadership to creativity-specific efficacy beliefs.

We also aim to extend the multilevel perspective on leadership and creativity research by simultaneously demonstrating the entrepreneurial leadership-creativity relationship at both the individual and team level. Our explanations with regard to the positive association of entrepreneurial leadership-worker/group creativity highlight the value of identifying entrepreneurial leadership in creativity research, individually and collectively. Furthermore, extending prior studies on how team-level factors lead to individual creativity, our research addresses the paucity of research exploring the multilevel mechanisms by which entrepreneurial leadership promotes employee creativity.

While the organizational literature suggests that team efficacy may be more important to employee outcomes in a collectivistic culture (e.g. Asian countries), as it is influenced by contextual variables, few studies have empirically examined the team-level mechanisms that transfer the influence of (entrepreneurial) leadership to individual creative outcomes. Our finding that team creative efficacy exerts a cross-level mediating influence on the relationship between entrepreneurial leadership and employee creativity empirically identifies the top-down effects of team properties on individual creativity. This strengthens the theoretical argument in SCT  that when a team has a high level of (creative) efficacy, members are highly likely to put their efforts toward (creative) achievements, as their strong connection with the team encourages their personal creative contributions to greater team results. More importantly, by simultaneously including both self- and team efficacies, our findings make a significant contribution to the debate regarding the similar importance of various types of efficacy in creativity research by showing that both individual creative efficacy and team creative efficacy are key antecedents to employee creativity in collectivistic countries. Future research is needed in other collectivistic countries as well as in countries with other specific cultural characteristics to further study the relationship between entrepreneurial leadership and workforce creativity.

Managerial Implications

Our findings have practical implications. First, in order to help employees challenge the status quo and help teams collaborate toward creative idea generation and realization, organizations should recognize the value of entrepreneurial leadership in the current business environment by selecting leaders with entrepreneurial characteristics (e.g. identifying and exploiting opportunities). Training (e.g. designing dynamic and acceptable goals) should also be provided to develop leaders' skills in terms of displaying entrepreneurial behaviours and to enable managers to be more consciously aware and develop an entrepreneurial leadership style. At the same time, organizations can instil entrepreneurship to develop managers' entrepreneurial skills. For example, establishing entrepreneurial leadership requirements for managers (e.g. thinking, behaving and working in entrepreneurial ways could be highly encouraged) and providing practical techniques to help them enact entrepreneurial leadership behaviours (e.g. building creative visions and organizing human capital) may benefit the management of workplace creativity. Moreover, practices should be conducted to help managers use and exploit entrepreneurial leadership, which encourages individuals to think, frame and analyse entrepreneurial opportunities. For example, providing motivation and rewards may be effective in facilitating the development of managers' entrepreneurial leadership capabilities.

Our results also point to the benefits of creative efficacy. Thus, leaders and organizations should display desirable behaviours to nourish employees' and teams' creative capability (e.g. providing expectations and encouragement toward creativity) and help members share strong beliefs concerning their teams' creative capabilities. At the same time, given the importance of creative team efficacy in predicting employee creativity, organizations should develop practices to build creative teams and develop team members' understanding of common goals as well as confidence in goal realization. This may boost employees' contributions not only as part of a strong unit but also as an independent creative actor.

Limitations and Future Directions for Research

First, our cross-sectional design may generate ambiguity regarding causality. For example, team and employee creativity may enable leaders to act entrepreneurially, accounting for the observed association. Future studies may use a longitudinal empirical research design to more clearly confirm the causal effects. Second, our arguments and results regarding compatible leadership and creativity lead to the conclusion that it is crucial for leaders who want to inspire their subordinates towards creativity to develop an entrepreneurial leadership style in organizations. Hence, we also conclude that it is critical for scholars to further explore the possibilities of other compatible leadership styles in predicting creativity effectively. For example, as Van Knippenberg and Sitkin indicate, future studies could address the potential role of visionary leadership in mobilizing and motivating workplace creativity. Third, while our theoretical arguments rest upon the distinctiveness of entrepreneurial leadership in organizational behaviour research, we examine only its effectiveness in predicting creativity. Future research may consider other dependent outcomes individually and collectively to further establish the effects of entrepreneurial leadership. Furthermore, our study does not consider the effects of the working environment, which has been suggested as an important boundary condition influencing the effectiveness of entrepreneurial leadership in organizational research. For example, as an innovative climate stimulates employees to obtain resources from leaders, such a climate may accentuate the influence of leadership styles on personal attributes and then creativity. Thus, future research could examine whether organizational climate positively moderates the mediated effects of creative self-/team efficacy in the relationship between entrepreneurial leadership and employee/team creativity. Finally, although this study contributes empirical evidence with regard to the widely established relation between leadership styles and efficacy beliefs, future research is encouraged to explore the similarities or varieties in the effects of entrepreneurial leadership on creative self- and team efficacies. For example, as we mentioned in the theoretical section, entrepreneurial leadership may foster creative self-efficacy via role modelling while developing creative team efficacy by stimulating team interactions. It would thus be an interesting avenue for future research to study whether creative goal setting or promoting positive reactions to uncertainties may simultaneously mediate the effects of entrepreneurial leadership on self- and team efficacies. Such an investigation of the relevant mechanisms would enrich current knowledge on how creative efficacy beliefs at different levels could be managed by entrepreneurial leadership.