It is important to note that both leadership and management improve organizational creativity by focusing on and prioritizing employees.
Leadership and management play a central role in enhancing creativity in an organization, which occurs through a wide range of intricate manners. A study suggests that transformational leadership can have a profound effect on organizational creativity, which is facilitated by increased levels of individual motivation and intellectual stimulation (Çekmecelioğlu and Özbağ, 2016). Another research is indicative of the fact that the metric of interest is affected by the authentic form of management and leadership, which promotes work engagement and psychological meaningfulness (Chaudhary and Panda, 2018). In addition, an organizational creativity factor is deeply rooted in the notions of team efficacy and employee creative self-efficacy, which are primarily catalyzed through servant leadership (Yang, Liu, and Gu, 2017). However, according to research, “authoritarian leadership style reduces employee voice which in turn impacts on creativity and moral leadership facilitates creativity via employee voice” (Dedahanov et al., 2016, p. 2310). In other words, leaders and managers should strive to give freedom to employees in order for them to be able to freely express themselves, which opens a gateway for creativity.
Therefore, both managerial and leadership strategies need to be adjusted and altered in order to ensure an enhancement of organizational creativity. For example, it is stated that “both participative and supportive leadership are positively associated with the creativity of supervisory-rated subordinates when those subordinates adopted a focus on promotion” (Tung and Yu, 2016, p. 579). In practice, leaders and managers need to adopt holistic approaches by being engaged with subordinates as well as encouraging open creative initiatives (Dhiman, 2017). For instance, Pixar was able to release the very first fully animated film by empowering its talented employees over abstract ideas (Catmull, 2008).
Reference List
Catmull, E. (2008) ‘How Pixar fosters collective creativity?’, Harvard Business Review, Web.
Çekmecelioğlu, H. G., and Özbağ, G. K. (2016) ‘Leadership and creativity: the impact of transformational leadership on individual creativity’, Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences, 235(24), pp. 243-249.
Chaudhary, R., and Panda, C. (2018) ‘Authentic leadership and creativity: the intervening role of psychological meaningfulness, safety and work engagement’, International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, 67(9), pp. 2071-2088.
Dedahanov, A.T. et al. (2016) ‘A multi-level study of servant leadership on creativity: the roles of self-efficacy and power distance’, Management Decision, 54(9), pp. 2310-2324. Web.
Dhiman, S. (2017) Holistic leadership: a new paradigm for today’s leaders. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Tung, F. C., and Yu, T. W. (2016) ‘Does innovation leadership enhance creativity in high-tech industries?’, Leadership & Organization Development Journal, 37(5), pp. 579-592. Web.
Yang, J., Liu, H., and Gu, J. (2017) ‘A multi-level study of servant leadership on creativity: the roles of self-efficacy and power distance’, Leadership & Organization Development Journal, 38(5), pp. 610-629. Web.