Creative Leadership: A Multi-Context Conceptualization†

By C. Mainemelis, R. Kark, O. Epitropaki. 2015

231 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Various streams of organizational research have examined the relationship between creativity and leadership, albeit using slightly different names such as “creative leadership”, “leading for creativity and innovation”, and “managing creatives”. In this article, we review this dispersed body of knowledge and synthesize it under a global construct of creative leadership, which refers to leading others toward the attainment of a creative outcome. Under this unifying construct, we classify three more narrow conceptualizations that we observe in the literature: facilitating employee creativity; directing the materialization of a leader's creative vision; and integrating heterogeneous creative contributions. After examining the contextual characteristics associated with the three conceptualizations, we suggest that they represent three distinct collaborative contexts of creative leadership. We discuss the theoretical implications of a multi-context framework of creative leadership, especially in terms of resolving three persisting problems in the extant literature: lack of definitional clarity, shortage of nuanced theories, and low contextual sensitivity.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/383e7bb0122b4cfa0da4b09c51e764cf8e96fe04

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In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

Citations in the corpus

Working with creative leaders: Exploring the relationship between supervisors' and subordinates' creativity (2017, background): “Often when managers are promoting employees into higher level roles they prefer those who do not take risks over more creative or risk taking employees (Mainemelis et al., 2015).”
Leaders' responses to creative deviance: Differential effects on subsequent creative deviance and creative performance (2016, background): “Zhou, 2014, and Mainemelis et al., 2015).”
Does Entrepreneurial Leadership Foster Creativity Among Employees and Teams? The Mediating Role of Creative Efficacy Beliefs (2019, background): “Recent studies suggest that through their leadership style, managers can either encourage or inhibit employee and team creativity (e.g. Mainemelis et al. 2015; Mumford et al. 2002).”
Leadership, creativity and innovation: a meta-analytic review (2020, methodology): “In addition, we examined the reference lists from any relevant review articles and most recent papers (Hughes et al., 2018; Mainemelis et al., 2015; Reiter-Palmon & Illies, 2004; Wang et al., 2011; Watts, Steele, & Den Hartog, 2019).”
Leadership and followership identity processes: A multilevel review ☆ (2017, background): “In their integrative review of the creative leadership literature, Mainemelis et al. (2015) observed that leadership research undertaken in traditional work settings (i.”
Collective leadership behaviors: Evaluating the leader, team network, and problem situation characteristics that influence their use (2016, background): “The benefits observed around utilizing collectivistic approaches in an innovative setting appear to stem from leaders drawing in ideas and talent from others in the team and pooling unique strengths (Mainemelis et al., 2015), thus it is expected that Leader– Team Exchange will be used more in the in”