"The effect of leadership
styles on employees’ innovative work behaviour"
- Why analyzing
employees to acknowledge about their innovative work? Because from a business perspective,
organizational creativity is linked to the creative behaviour of employees:
every good idea begins in the mind of an individual. But it also requires a
guide, a leader to focus commitment to create something. Therefore, leadership
and creativity go hand in hand.
Leaders influence employee behaviour and employee behaviour influences the success of a company. It is a correlation.
The complexity of today’s business environment – such as customer’s access to unlimited information and globalization – creates new wants and needs in people, and the necessity for businesses to constantly innovate to satisfy those desires in order to survive. It is about adapting or dying.
- What about the styles? Well, transformational leadership primarily encourages creativity unlike the transactional style. Even so, there are many studies that affirm pros and cons of both styles, without reaching a consensus.
Leadership and Innovative
Behaviour
v Transformational Style:
It creates a psychologically safe environment for innovation,
especially in front of uncertain outcomes, and foster employee self-efficacy by
focusing efforts on common goals while being creative. Therefore, Inspiring/challenging
motivation and Intellectual stimulation make employees exceed expectations
and generate a snowball effect on the rest of employees.
v Transactional Style:
Because the focus is on job performance, not
innovation, employees are expected to be rewarded or punished based on the
completion of tasks. Leaders target task completion and performance, stagnating
creative capacity and causing a negative impact on innovation as a mere consequence.
v Laisser-fair Style:
Their approach is to avoid contact with employees and decision-making,
neglecting responsibilities. These leaders only intervene in the face of inexcusable
violations, killing creativity and motivation.
The Results
The study used a descriptive analytical approach using a
cross-functional survey to university employees who were mostly well-educated,
adults, over 16 years of experience, men/women. The curious part was to obtain positive
results on innovation from Transformational and Laisser-fair
styles, except for Transactional style. But later, a more detailed
analysis conclude that Transformational style is the only creating a positive
impact throughout a “sense of collective responsibility”, while the others negatively
affect creativity and innovation.
It is interesting how this study recognizes the importance of a transformational
leadership style for modern companies, especially those dedicated to technology
and innovative designs (such as Apple, Google, and Amazon) But for other
companies, the transformational style might not be the best approach if the
mission and vision rely in a more conservative way of doing things, such as maintaining
a traditional family business, like a restaurant: customers will expect the
same recipes and may not try new flavors. Over time, the family business is
likely to disappear after customers begin to disappear as well; even some employees
are reluctant to changes and feel much better within their comfort zone. So, even
if the most likely scenario is that the traditional restaurant may not exist after
their target market vanishes, in that specific moment in time and for that
specific segment (through the eyes of their employees, customers and management)
the transactional style should be a perfect fit if they do not care what would
happen to the business after they are gone.
Ahleet,
A, Adwan, A., Areiqat, A., Zamil, A., & Saleh, M. (2021). The Effect of
Leadership Styles on Employees’ Innovative Work Behavior. Growing Science,
11(1), 239–246. https://doi.org/10.5267/j.msl.2020.8.010
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