The role of leaders and leadership for individual, team and organisational creativity and innovation

The effect of leaders and the leadership process on individual and team creativity can be either positive (facilitative) or negative (inhibitive). For instance, Zhang et al (2011) find that teams with authoritarian leaders tend to be less creative, while teams with transformational leaders more. Similarly, some leader behaviours are associated with positive outcomes relating to creativity (e.g. forgiving, rewarding), while others with negative (e.g. punishing, manipulating) (Li et al., 2015). Factors relating to leadership processes have also been identified as having an impact on creativity, with leader-follower relationship quality dominating the literature as the main factor being studied consistently and found to affect creativity (Atwater, 2009; Gu et al., 2013; Volmer et al., 2011). Although the empirical evidence on the effects of leadership on creativity is still sparse, much of it points in the direction that the relationship between the two factors is complex, with various boundary conditions (e.g. creative self-efficacy, job autonomy) and mediators (e.g. communication, trust, knowledge sharing) at play. In order to better understand the relationship between leadership and creativity a more holistic and systematic evaluation of individual, team and organisational factors is vital.

The project will build and test an interpretive theoretical model on the role of leaders and leadership for individual, team and organisational creativity and innovation.