The influence of leader’s creativity on employees’ and team creativity: Role of identification with leader

This study aims to explore the domain of leader’s creativity and suggests that leader’s creativity can be present as both worker-role creativity and manager-role creativity. Then, the study examines the influence of leader’s worker-role creativity and manager-role creativity on employees’ creativity and team creativity. As a contextual factor, the identification with leader is taken as a moderator at both the individual and team levels.

With data that was collected from 229 employees and 32 team leaders in entrepreneurial and R&D teams of China, hierarchical regression is conducted to test the hypotheses at individual and team levels separately.

The results show that leader identification plays a different role in moderating the effects of worker-role creativity and manager-role creativity on employees’ and team creativity. For the relationships between worker-role creativity and employees’ and team creativity, they are positive when leader identification is high and negative when it is low. For the relationships between manager-role creativity and team creativity, it is stronger when leader identification is higher rather than lower.

This study answers the call for studying the roles of creative role models and provides new evidence of the leader as a role model. The exploration of the domain of leader’s creativity and the different effects on creative outcome brings an interesting perspective on creativity and leadership research.

The present study draws on the advance to develop the content of leader’s creativity. Then, the moderating role of identification with leader between leader’s creativity and employees’ creativity and team creativity is comprehensively examined.