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Leadership, creativity and innovation: a meta-analytic review

Version 2 2024-06-05, 06:00
Version 1 2019-11-18, 15:56
journal contribution
posted on 2024-06-05, 06:00 authored by A Lee, A Legood, D Hughes, AW Tian, A Newman, C Knight
© 2019, © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. 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.

History

Journal

European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology

Volume

29

Pagination

1-36

Location

London, Eng.

ISSN

1359-432X

eISSN

1464-0643

Language

eng

Publication classification

C Journal article, C1 Refereed article in a scholarly journal

Issue

1

Publisher

Taylor & Francis