The Interactive Effect of Supportive Leadership and Creative Process Engagement on Employee Creativity

Abstract

In the modern organizational context, creativity is a key factor for organizational competitiveness, and leaders play a crucial role in promoting employee creativity. While previous research has shown that positive impact of constructive leader behaviors on employee creativity, there have been inconsistent results regarding the implications of supportive leadership on creativity. To address the limitation, integrating the notion of leadership, creativity, and the dominance complementarity theory, we examine the interactive effect of supportive leadership and employee creative process engagement on employee creativity. Specifically, first, we expect a positive relationship between leader coaching and employee creativity, with considering leader coaching as a form of supportive leadership. Second, we further posit that this relationship varies depending on the level of employee creative process engagement. In particular, we expect that the association will become an inverted U-shaped relationship, meaning that beyond a certain level, leader coaching may hinder employee creativity. To examine the above hypotheses, we collected the survey data from 187 leader-follower dyads of employees who work in Korean organizations; we found that all hypotheses were supported. With this study, we intend to contribute to the advancement of research on creativity, leadership, and the theory of dominance complementarity.