Fueling the Creative Spark: How Authentic Leadership and LMX Foster Employees’ Proactive Orientation and Creativity

Creativity is a critical determinant of organizations’ abilities to compete and perform in rapidly changing and complex contexts. Though scholars have identified several contextual factors, such as leadership, that motivate employees’ creative performance, the psychological mechanisms and boundary c...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of leadership & organizational studies Vol. 30; no. 3; pp. 356 - 374
Main Authors Sumanth, John J., Černe, Matej, Hannah, Sean T., Škerlavaj, Miha
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Los Angeles, CA SAGE Publications 01.08.2023
Sage Publications Ltd
Subjects
Creativity
Employees
Field Studies
Leader-member exchange
Leadership
Social exchange theory
social exchange theory
authentic leadership
proactive orientation
creative performance
creativity
leader–member exchange (LMX)
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Summary:Creativity is a critical determinant of organizations’ abilities to compete and perform in rapidly changing and complex contexts. Though scholars have identified several contextual factors, such as leadership, that motivate employees’ creative performance, the psychological mechanisms and boundary conditions underpinning this relationship are relatively unknown. Drawing on social exchange theory, we propose that a proactive orientation, a psychological state rooted in the cognitive and behavioral process of setting a proactive goal and striving to achieve it, is a critical mechanism linking authentic leadership to employees’ creativity. Across two field studies of working professionals in Central Europe and the U.S., we show how authentic leadership fuels employees’ creative performance through a proactive orientation and introduce leader–member exchange (LMX) as an important moderator of this mediated relationship. In Study 1, using a sample of European manufacturing employees, we find support for the mediating role of a proactive orientation linking authentic leadership to creative performance, above, and beyond the effects of ethical leadership. In Study 2, using a sample of university staff, we replicate this finding and extend it by highlighting the moderating role of LMX on the authentic leadership-proactive orientation relationship.
ISSN:1548-0518
1939-7089
DOI:10.1177/15480518231180064