Authentic Leaders

Authentic leadership and employee creativity

One of the developing pillars of the field of the leadership is authentic leadership since the last decade. Authentic leaders are required in organizations for helping employees find significance and association at work so that they can deal with the novel, chaotic, and vigorously altering work surroundings via making a vital difference in organizations. Authenticity originates from Greek philosophy and has an imperative place in theoretical writings and refers to "thine own self be true".

According to Walumbwa, Avolio, Gardner, Wernsing, and Peterson followers think about leaders authenticity according to how much they symbolize these four unique components that characterize authentic leadership; an internalized moral perspective which refers to a self-regulation system operated by internal moral values and principles which they strongly believe and follow; balanced processing which refers to making a decision impartially after carefully scrutinizing relevant data and information; self-awareness which refers to the understanding of a leader about his or her own strengths and weaknesses and their effect on others; and relational transparency which refers to the level to which a leader is geared up to share opinions and information among followers and encourages followers to do alike.

Creativity involves production of fresh and valuable concepts relating to goods, services, procedures, and processes. Creativity look for unique ways of doing work and novel ideas associated with developing new opportunities. In the place of work, the process in which new ideas are generated and original, appreciated, and valuable solutions are given for a particular problem is known as creativity. In almost any employment at various stages; creativity is valued across many professions and industries. Creativity delivers rare and distinctive assistance to organizations. Creativity results in prosperous companies, satisfied employees, financial affluence, and social growth. According to definition, creativity has two fundamental basics; novelty and usefulness which explains creativity as creation of original and constructive ideas regarding goods, services, processes, management practices, business models, and competitive strategies. The objective of creative performance is not merely production of enormous number of concepts, but to generate new products and services, to adapt market-place opportunities into business for organizations and to make organizations more operational through producing such ideas that can solve problems that are faced.

Leadership is a feature that empowers employees to promote creativity and innovation with the proper feedback. Concept of psychological security and inherent motivation assist to endorse our hypothesis which affirm authentic leadership is related to employee's creativeness which refers that authentic leaders encourage employee's insights of mental security and their built-in motivation, which consequently make them extra original. Michie and Gooty predicted that authentic leaders also raise authenticity amid their dependents because they sense less prone to the changes that employees' honest and original ideas may infer and are more prone to welcome their creative ideas. The quest of new opportunities results in disagreement of employees with leader. Therefore, to accomplish a non-routine role of creativity, employees require reassuring behavior of leader. Creativity is nurtured by Employees' intrinsic motivation as naturally stimulated employees are (1) additionally inquisitive and slanted toward learning, (2) they are flexible in their intellectual thinking, (3) they are risks takers, and (4) when they encounter challenges, hurdles, and opportunities they seem to be more determined. Authentic leaders enhance the positive sentiments of employees by constructing supportive, positive, reasonable, and transparent connections with them which as a result escalates their creativity. A positive association between ethical and moral perspective and employee creativity has also been evident from previous studies. Considering the literature proposes that authentic leaders by supporting the autonomy of their employees make them fundamentally more motivated. Therefore, our first hypothesis pursues that:

H1: Authentic Leadership has significant positive effect on employee Creativity

Authentic leadership, work engagement, and psychological empowerment

Kahn explained employee engagement as the demonstration of people's entire personalities which include physical, intellectual, and emotional roles in their work part. He conceptualized that how employee perceives the work contexts surrounding him or her influences the level of the person's favorable engagement with it. The idea of work engagement can be defined as an optimistic, satisfying, job-related shape of mind that is distinguished by strength, devotion, and absorption. To be exact, work engagement is considered to be representing how employees recognize their work as a deliberate and thoughtful pursuit of work (dedication or intellectual engagement); as captivating and exciting (emotional engagement); and as stimulating and energetic that they are enthusiastic to devote themselves with passion (vigor or behavioral engagement). Work engagement has many positive outcomes that's why it is a crucial aspect for organizations. It has a substantial effect on employees along with organizations. Work engagement leads to better job performance and more positive work outcomes by attaching employees physically and emotionally to their organization.

Researchers and practitioners have increasingly paying attention to empowerment because it offers the potential to positively influence outcomes that not only advantages individuals but organizations as well. The concept of empowerment has been well thought-out as a powerful weapon to elevate organizational efficiency. Giving people the authority to make decisions has been perceived as empowerment. From previous theories of empowerment the idea of empowerment is digged out by Spreitzer and he explained psychological empowerment as a kind of intrinsic motivation which is established from four kinds of perceptions: meaning, competence, self-determination, and impact. It is argued that these four dimensions are essential to constitute the whole construct of psychological empowerment; and the overall degree of observed empowerment declines as a result of absence of a single out of these four dimensions. The conceptualizations of the dimensions are:

(1) Meaning: Perceived worth of a work or task.

(2) Competence: The magnitude to which an individual have faith in that he or she has the essential abilities to accomplish the organizational activities.

(3) Self-determination: A choice of introducing and regulating activities performed by self.

(4) Impact: Perceiving self has a kind of influence to one's immediate work atmosphere.

Therefore, psychologically empowered employee feels internally motivated because he recognizes his work worth something, he know that he is capable of doing that work, he has a kind of control to one's immediate work place and he has choice of introducing and regulating activities performed by self. All these magnitudes give the employee a boost and help him to feel empowered.

A close association among authentic leadership and engagement is effortlessly predictable. It has been reasoned that followers who work under authentic leaders are more probable to be engaged, as the leaders have a tendency to motivate their followers' value and conduct so that their followers are capable to be obvious, reasonable, ethical, and decent in their work role. By creating a shared special sense of "us" leaders are capable to encourage work engagement and avoid stress among group members. Findings recommend that authentic leadership means being capable of facilitating the development of a distinctive sense of "us" shared among the leader and the group members. Therefore, it can be hypothesized that:

H2: Authentic Leadership has significant positive effect on Work Engagement.

A study revealed that a close connection is there amid authentic leadership and psychological empowerment. Employees are treated with admiration rather than treating them as a resource to complete task by authentic leaders. Consequently, a stronger sense of connotation at work is experienced by employees, which is one of the leading aspects in psychological empowerment. Besides this, one more vital factor in the employee's psychological empowerment is feeling autonomous in decision-making; employees of authentic leaders identify themselves as self-sufficient in making their own decisions. Self-awareness and self-regulated behaviors of both leaders and followers are positively affected by authentic leadership. Authentic leaders stimulate motivation for individual growth and self-development of their employees. The employees feel more comfortable under such supervision where they can get motivation and inspiration. A leader who is genuinely authentic will surely try to make his employee feel empowered.

We, therefore, hypothesize that:

H3: Authentic Leadership has significant positive effect on Psychological Empowerment.

Work engagement, psychological empowerment, and employee creativity

Bedarkar and Pandita studied the drivers of employee engagement impacting employee performance and they establish that the most important resource of an organization is its employees, they must be given good space and time to create an ideal combination of work and fun at their place of work, this is the only way to set sense of engagement in the employees. Therefore, organizations should take steps to fulfill employee's expectations, thus, creating an impact on the performance of the employee which will affect the performance of the organization ultimately. A study was done on work engagement and performance in which 105 school principals and 232 teachers were involved. A noteworthy and positive relationship between work engagement scores and performance and leadership was revealed in their research. Additionally, engagement was strongly associated to creativity; the participants with higher levels of work engagement were capable to come up with diverse ways to deal with difficulties and problems in their work environment. Fredrickson in his broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions explained that through widening the collection of opinions and actions that approach any mind, certain constructive emotions which may include happiness, curiosity, and contentment, all contribute to the competence to widen people's temporary thought – action repertoires and construct their personal resources that may range from materialistic to intellectual resources and also include social and psychological resources. For example, joy broadens resources by developing the urge to play and be more original. Work engagement is an important feature which emphasize on the insight of an employee toward his work. The additional meaning he gives to his work, extra engaged he feels at his job. As a result, it will increase his creativity and he will be able to give more dynamic and original results in his workplace.

Work engagement results in employee productivity as an outcome with many other productive outcomes in this experience.

Therefore, it can be hypothesized that:

H4: Work Engagement has significant positive effect on employee Creativity.

Employees utilize extra determination to view a problem from various perspectives, when they find out that their work needs are substantial and individually significant. On top of it, when employees believe that they have the ability and when they are given the requisite resources to carry out employment productively, they possess a certain range of autonomy more than job setup. For that reason, they can easily figure out great outcomes as a result of their behavior and performance. They are more likely to concentrate on idea production and solution-oriented results in an extra attentive and persistent way. As a result, employees who feel more psychologically empowered would be inclined to disclose extra creativity in their work. Furthermore, the relation between psychological empowerment and creativity is backed up by preceding research. Empowered individuals observe more efficiency in carrying out tasks as they are more innovative and creative,  and exhibit more extra-role performance. We therefore, hypothesize that:

H5: Psychological Empowerment has significant positive effect on employee creativity

Mediating role of work engagement and psychological empowerment

The mediating effect of work engagement on the relationship between authentic leadership and employee creativity has never been studied in literature. But work engagement has been used as mediator in many studies between various variables. Bakker and Bal establish that work engagement fully mediated the association among autonomy and job-performance. In addition, Salanova and Schaufeli found that relationship between job resources and optimistic behavior at work is fully mediated by work engagement. Vinarski-Peretz and Carmeli's study confirmed that encouraging mental situation which includes work engagement plays a vital role in enhancing innovative performance. Binnewies, Ohly, and Sonnentag reported that individual inventiveness is absolutely related to idea creativity.

Therefore, seventh hypothesis that is to be tested is as follows:

H6: Work Engagement mediates the relationship between the Authentic Leadership and employee creativity.

In addition to the studies that showed a positive relationship between AL and PE, it is expected that PE will increase when perception of AL among employees increases. When a leader gives respect, trust, and identification to his employee, it guide employees to experience better mental security which as a result help them to feel free to take risks, present conflicting thoughts, and put forward unconventional ideas without any hesitation. Therefore, pushing employees to be extra creative and original in their routine tasks helps them to solve problems and avail opportunities.

It is important to note that although separate independent studies have been done to show that there are significant relationships between the variables mentioned, there has been no research that tests the goodness of fit of all these variables in a single study.

Therefore, sixth hypothesis that is to be tested is as follows:

H7: Psychological empowerment mediates the relationship between authentic leadership and employee creativity.

Proposed theoretical/conceptual framework

The following model was tested in order to predict the impact of Authentic Leadership on Employee's Creativity in Pakistani project-based organizations.

Proposed research methodology

The data were collected from 300 employees working in project-based NGOs' of Islamabad and Rawalpindi. Out of which data of 246 respondent's data were used for further analysis. P-P graphs and the values of skewness and kurtosis show that data are normally distributed.

Sources of instrumentation

This research was conducted using a five-point Likert scale, where 1 stand for Strongly Disagree, 2 symbolize Disagree, 3 correspond to Neutral, 4 signify Agree, and 5 embody Strongly Agree option for every variable item, except for demographics where nominal scale was used. For Authentic lead- ership 14-items scale was used which was developed by Schaufeli and Bakker. Some of the items included in this instrument were "My leader clearly states what he/she means" and "My leader shows consistency between his/her beliefs and actions". Cronbach Alpha value was 0.87.

For Work Engagement 17-items scale was used which was developed by Schaufeli and Bakker. Some of the items incorporated in this instrument were "At my work, I feel bursting with energy". And "time flies when I am working". Cronbach Alpha value was 0.89.

Twelve-items Psychological empowerment scale by Spreitzer was used to measure psychological empowerment. Some of the items incorporated in this instrument were "The work I do is very important to me" and " I have mastered the skills necessary for my job". Cronbach Alpha value was 0.81

For the measurement of Creativity, Zhou and George's 13-item scale were used. Sample items include "come up with creative solutions to problems" and "a good source of creative ideas". Cronbach Alpha value was 0.85.

The cronbach value of all instruments for this present study was greater than 0.70 which according to Nunnally and Bernstein is acceptable confirming the reliability of the instruments. The demographic variables Gender and Education were controlled.

For mediation analysis Hayes and Scharkow process was used as it gives more precise results compared to baron and Kenny approach.