Concept Development Of Creative Leadership And Its Influence On Organizational Creativity

Given the rapidly changing technology and increasing competition,creativity bas been recognized to be necessary for the development of organizations.How to improve employees' and team's creativity is one of the most important issues that a company should concern.Leadership is a key factor that can improve creativity.Leadership,which is the necessary resource for maintenance and survival of corporates,has greatly promoted the creativity of organizations.On one hand,leaders need to take effective ways to facilitate employee creativity;on the other hand,compared to the simple context in the past,leaders face uncertain and indeterminate environment and they need to solve the complex problems in creative ways.To date,most of the researches on organizational creativity focus on the first aspect,while the research of leader's creativity or creative leadership is limited.In the past,creativity is optional.But it is necessary in nowadays and a leader who is lack of creativity is unlikely to improve the development of organizations.However,how to be a creative leader and how creative leadership affects creativity is still unclear.In order to examine the creative leader behavior and its influences,the present study proposed the concept of creative leadership.Many researches have reviewed the relationship between leadership and creativity,and m any behaviors had been identified positively related to employees' creativity from both leader characteristic perspective and leader behavior perspective.Although researchers did not focused on creative leadership,there are still some behaviors can be recognized as creative leader behaviors.The researches from leader characteristic perspective and leader behavior perspective focus on two kinds of content of creative leadership,respectively.According to the researches of leader characteristic perspective,the most important characteristics of creative leadership is the creative presence of the leader in doing the works.With achieving creativity by working,the leader is a "creative worker".According to the researches of leader behavior perspective,creative leadership refers to the creative behaviors of leaders in managing and coordinating the leading process.With achieving creativity by leading,the leader is a "creative manager".The difference between "creative worker" and "creative manager" is that only the leader deals with manage work.Thus,only a leader but not an employee can be a "creative manager".Based on the domains of creative leadership,three studies are conducted to develop the measurement of creative leadership and to examine the influences of creative leadership at individual and team level.Firstly,study 1 uses three independent samples to develop the creative leadership scale.The exploratory factor analysis identifies two dimensions of creative leadership.The confirmatory factor analysis with another sample confirmed the structure and results show that all items loaded onto their respective factors and factor loadings were all above 0.5 with Cronbach ? above 0.7.The scale with good reliability and validity provides measure instrument,riches the creative leadership research,and transfers theoretical research of creative leadership to experimental study.Secondly,study 2 examines the positive relationship between creative leadership and employees' creativity at individual level.With a sample of 244 pairs of leader and employee questionnaires from R&D teams of high-tech companies,the results of regression with OLS method show that creative leadership positively related to employees' creativity and creative self-efficacy mediates this relationship;the effects of creative self-efficacy on creativity will be stronger when the employee creative goal setting is high.The meaning of this study is two-fold.First,it shows the criterion validity of the creative leadership scale that developed in study 1.Second,it examines the effective framework of creative leadership in the leadership paradigm and confirms the efficiency of creative leadership.Thirdly,study 3 examines the influence of creative leadership on team creativity at team level.The sample is 41 teams from high-tech companies.At team level,the results of regression with OLS method show that creative leadership is positively related to team creativity,and the relationship is mediated by team learning behavior;team identification moderates the relationships between creative leadership and team creativity in such that when team identification is high,the relationship is stronger;also,team identification moderates the relationships between creative leadership and team learning behavior in such that when team identification is high,the relationship is stronger.In addition,the study examines a cross-level model.The results of hierarchical liner modeling show that team creative leadership moderates the relationship between employee creative efficacy and creativity.When creative leadership is high in the team,employee creative efficacy is more likely result in creativity.Study 3 confirms the influences of creative leadership in teams and makes a contribution to the multi-level theory of leadership.The team level research completes creative leadership theory and confirms the efficiency of creative leadership with more comprehensive evidences.The theoretical and practical implications of the results are discussed,along with study limitations and future research opportunities.