Leadership, creativity and innovation: a meta-analytic review

By Allan Lee, A. Legood, D. A. Hughes, A. Tian, Alexander Newman, Caroline Knight. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 2020

303 citations recorded by the source corpus.

ABSTRACT This paper reports the most comprehensive meta-analytic examination of the relationship between leadership and both followers’ creative and innovative performance. Specifically, we examined 13 leadership variables (transformational, transactional, ethical, humble, leader-member exchange, benevolent, authoritarian, entrepreneurial, authentic, servant, empowering, supportive, and destructive) using data from 266 studies. In addition to providing robustly estimated correlations, we explore two theoretically and pragmatically important issues: the relative importance of the different leadership constructs and moderators of the relationship between leadership and employee creativity and innovation. Regrading creative performance, authentic, empowering, and entrepreneurial leadership demonstrated the strongest relationships. For innovative performance, both transactional (contingent reward) and supportive leadership appear particularly relevant. The current study synthesizes an important, burgeoning, diverse body of research, and in doing so, generates nuanced evidence that can be used to guide theoretical advancements, improved research designs, and up-to-date policy recommendations regarding leading for creativity, and innovation.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c2299e6910b32c049d84f3c2b45519dc19e2629b