Synthesizing theories of leadership, empowerment, and creativity, this research built and tested a theoretical model linking empowering leadership with creativity via several intervening variables. Using survey data from professional employees and their supervisors in a large information technology company in China, we found that, as anticipated, empowering leadership positively affected psychological empowerment, which in turn influenced both intrinsic motivation and creative process engagement. These latter two variables then had a positive influence on creativity. Empowerment role identity moderated the link between empowering leadership and psychological empowerment, whereas leader encouragement of creativity moderated the connection between psychological empowerment and creative process engagement.

Linking Empowering Leadership and Employee Creativity: The Influence of Psychological Empowerment, Intrinsic Motivation, and Creative Process Engagement

https://www.uio.no/studier/emner/matnat/ifi/INF5181/h15/articles-teamwork/mathieu_etal_2008_team-effectiveness-1997_2007_a_review_of_advancements_and_a_glimpse_into_the_future.pdf

Team Effectiveness 1997-2007: A Review of Recent Advancements and a Glimpse Into the Future:

We surveyed management teams in 102 hotel properties in the United States to examine the intervening roles of knowledge sharing and team efficacy in the relationship between empowering leadership and team performance. Team performance was measured through a time-lagged market-based source. Results showed that empowering leadership was positively related to both knowledge sharing and team efficacy, which, in turn, were both positively related to performance.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/20159830.pdf

Empowering Leadership in Management Teams: Effects on Knowledge Sharing, Efficacy, And Performance

This exploratory study investigated leader behaviors related to perceived leader support, encompassing both instrumental and socioemotional support. The study first established that leader support, proposed to be a key feature of the work environment for creativity, was positively related to the peer-rated creativity of subordinates working on creative projects in seven different companies. Then, to identify the specific leader behaviors that might give rise to perceived support, two qualitative analyses were conducted on daily diary narratives written by these subordinates. The first, which focused on specific leader behaviors that had significantly predicted leader support in a preliminary quantitative analysis, illuminated both effective and ineffective forms of leader behavior. In addition, it revealed not only subordinate perceptual reactions to this behavior (their perceptions of leader support), but affective reactions as well. The second qualitative analysis focused on the behavior of two extreme team leaders in context over time, revealing both positive and negative spirals of leader behavior, subordinate reactions, and subordinate creativity.

Leader Behaviors and the Work Environment for Creativity: Perceived Leader Support

The leadership literature suffers from a lack of theoretical integration (Avolio, 2007, American Psychologist, 62, 25–33). This article addresses that lack of integration by developing an integrative trait-behavioral model of leadership effectiveness and then examining the relative validity of leader traits (gender, intelligence, personality) and behaviors (transformational-transactional, initiating structure-consideration) across 4 leadership effectiveness criteria (leader effectiveness, group performance, follower job satisfaction, satisfaction with leader). Combined, leader traits and behaviors explain a minimum of 31% of the variance in leadership effectiveness criteria. Leader behaviors tend to explain more variance in leadership effectiveness than leader traits, but results indicate that an integrative model where leader behaviors mediate the relationship between leader traits and effectiveness is warranted.

/pdf/trait-and-behavioral-theories-of-leadership-an-integration-2m70tdrf1d.pdf

Trait and behavioral theories of leadership: an integration and meta-analytic test of their relative validity

This paper describes the construction and empirical evaluation of a new scale for measuring empowering leader behavior. Study One consisted of thorough interviews with external leaders and team members in three organizations. Behaviors elicited in the interviews were classified by researchers into eight categories of leader empowering behavior and the Empowering Leadership Questionnaire (ELQ) was constructed to measure each of these categories. In Study Two, the ELQ was administered to team members and leaders from two organizations. The results indicated that five-factors (Coaching, Informing, Leading By Example, Showing Concern/Interacting with the Team, and Participative Decision-Making) adequately describe the data. In Study Three, we cross-validated the scale in a sample from five organizations and the factor analysis confirmed the five-factor model. The ELQ dimensions were also compared with behaviors measured by two well-established measures of leader behavior. The results indicated that the ELQ dimensions partially overlap with previously identified constructs, but that empowering leadership behavior can not be entirely accounted for by the earlier measures. Definitions and implications for the categories of empowering leader behaviors are offered. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Sharon Arad

Papers

The empowering leadership questionnaire: the construction and validation of a new scale for measuring leader behaviors