Authentic Leaders

The findings of this research suggest noteworthy hypothetical contributions to the literature and organizational implications. It is the first study which empirically tested and validated the mediating effect of work engagement and psychological empowerment on the relationship of authentic leadership and employee creativity. Recent studies involving mediating variables between authentic leadership and employee creativity only included hope, positive effect, and psychological capital. The significant coefficient values between the variables allow us to predict that an association exists among them. The results show that authentic leadership is a strong predictor of employee creativity. The same results have been suggested in literature by Rego et al. Employees are more creative under authentic leaders because they feel much more engaged and empowered under their supervision. Authentic leadership has also shown positive strong correlation with work engagement, which indicates that an authentic leader is proficient enough to keep his employees more engaged and involved in their work by creating a special association with them. Giallonardo et al. also explained this relation that employees who work under leaders who show authenticity are likely to be more engaged at their work.

The hypothesis which stated that Work engagement has positive significant relation with employee creativity is also accepted in results which confirm that more engaged employees will show more creativity. When a person is more engaged in his/her work, it is naturally expected that more productive results can be achieved. Bakker et al. did a research in which they established a fact that engagement has a strong association with creativity because the respondents who possess high level of work engagement in their research showed a broad range of ways to cope with on job difficulties and problems. Work engagement is also mediating between authentic leadership and employee creativity which implies that more engaged employees who recognize their work as important part of their lives are more likely to be more creative under authentic leaders.

In our findings, authentic leadership has found to be strongly correlated with psychological empowerment which reveals the impact of an authentic leader on sense of empowerment in employees. Zue, May, and Avolio found out that there is an essential relationship among authentic leadership and empowerment. Thus, our results are confirming their findings. When a leader is authentic, he gives his employees a sense of respect and creates an extraordinary association with them in workplace. This as a result, makes the employee feel more motivated and empowered. 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. Therefore, the employee can generate new ideas on regular basis and can be more creative in carrying out different tasks.

The results of the research shows psychological empowerment has positive significant relation with employee creativity which suggests that the employees who feel more empowered in their work place are going to be more creative. They will feel free to make their own decisions and will not feel hesitant to try new ideas and solutions for different problems they face in their organization.

Moreover, there are many researches in literature which hold up this link between creativity and empowerment. Psychological empowerment is also playing role of partial mediator among authentic leadership and employee creativity. This gives an impression that employees who feel more empowered will show more creativity under the supervision of authentic leader.