Empowering Leadership and Team Creativity: An Examination of Direct and Indirect Path

Abstract

In this research, we investigated how empowering leadership is related with team level creativity of employees. Integrating theory of group behavior with componential theory of creativity, we found that empowering leadership behavior affects the team level creativity of employees directly and indirectly through the mediation of team learning behavior and team psychological empowerment as team process and team emergent states. For this research we collected data from two sources (Subordinates, and Supervisors) by temporally dividing data collection process into two points in time for independent, dependent, and mediating variables from employees of a bank operating in Pakistan. Preliminary analysis and analysis with mediation and indirect affects performed to check the direct and indirect effects. Mplus 7.0 was used with random model techniques to analyze hypothesized model for employees’ sample (N = 343). Mediation was analyzed using indirect effect of random models and further confirmed the confidence using bootstrapping procedure. Further research findings, implications, and future research directions also discussed in this research.

Keywords: Empowering leadership; Team learning behavior; Team psychological empowerment; Team creativity