Transformational Leadership And Employee Creativity

In the context of increasing competition, firms must constantly engage in innovative activities to achieve sustainable competitive advantage. Organizational innovation is the successful implementation of creative ideas within an organization. Without the foundation of employee creativity, organization innovation cannot happen.Due to strong theoretical backbone but inconclusive empirical results on the relationship between transformational leadership and creativity, we try to find out the dark side of transformational leadership on creativity. By exploring the mediating role of pressure between transformational leadership and creativity, we find that challenging work, one type of pressure, mediates the positive relationship between transformational leadership and creativity, but more importantly, that workload pressure, the other type of pressure, mediates the negative relationship between transformational leadership and creativity. In a two-wave study of 905 employees nested in 205 work teams in 55 organizations in China, the finding supports "dark side" view that transformational leadership may have some impedimental effects on creativity through influencing workload pressure of followers. In a bunch of literature which extols favorable aspects of transformational leadership, our paper contributes to the research on dark side of transformational leadership.