Does climate for creativity mediate the impact of servant leadership on management innovation and innovative behavior in the hotel industry?

By Osman M. Karatepe, M. Aboramadan, Khalid Abed Dahleez. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, 2020

172 citations recorded by the source corpus.

PurposeDrawing from theory of organizational creativity, servant leadership (SEL), social exchange and social learning theories, this paper aims to propose a research model where climate for creativity mediates the influence of SEL on management innovation and innovative behavior. The model also investigates the linkage between innovative behavior and management innovation.Design/methodology/approachData collected from Arab hotel employees in Palestine were used to gauge the aforesaid linkages through structural equation modeling. Common method variance was checked through an unmeasured latent method factor.FindingsThe results reveal that climate for creativity mediates the impact of SEL on management innovation and innovative behavior. Successful SEL practices enable the organization to have climate for creativity, which, in turn, leads to management innovation and innovative behavior. Furthermore, hotel employees’ innovative behavior fosters management innovation.Practical implicationsTop management should have a high level of commitment to the SEL philosophy, which boosts climate for creativity and innovative behavior. It should also capitalize on climate for creativity to activate management innovation. In such an environment, management has to ensure that the supervisors are servant leaders and non-managerial employees are the potential servant leaders. Once employees are trained, empowered and rewarded in an environment which highlights effective SEL practices, they will be more eager to contribute to the company by exhibiting innovative behavior at elevated levels.Originality/valueDespite a number of studies in the current literature, evidence concerning the effect of SEL on management innovation and innovative behavior simultaneously is scarce. There is still a dearth of evidence pertaining to the underlying mechanism through which SEL fosters management innovation and innovative behavior. In addition, evidence appertaining to the impact of innovative behavior on management innovation is scarce. The study fills in these voids.

Subfields: Marketing, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9591753db45520e3a2d71f0aefe20ba9454536e2

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Marketing

1. C. Farao
2. Y. Kundi
3. M. Aboramadan

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

1. M. Aboramadan
2. C. Farao
3. Y. Kundi
4. M. Turkmenoglu
5. Berat Çiçek
6. Khalid Abed Dahleez

Citations in the corpus

• Examining the effects of environmentally-specific servant leadership on green work outcomes among hotel employees: the mediating role of climate for green creativity (2021, background): “In hospitality research, climate for creativity was found to mediate the relationship between servant leadership and innovative work behavior in Palestinian hotels (Karatepe et al., 2020).”
• Narcissistic leadership and behavioral cynicism in the hotel industry: the role of employee silence and negative workplace gossiping (2020, result): “Furthermore, in line with previous research (Karatepe et al., 2020), the unmeasured latent method factor was created as another tool to check for common method variance.”