Effectiveness of innovation leadership styles: a manager’s influence on ecological innovation in construction projects

Abstract

This article presents four basic innovation leadership styles: charismatic, instrumental, strategic and interactive innovation leadership. The leadership styles and their characteristsics relate to process and product innovations in construction projects. A theoretical framework – which synthesizes these relations – enables explorative research into the effects of leadership on organizational innovativeness. Four case studies, observing the same manager in four comparable projects, explore the effects of each leadership style on a construction project’s innovativeness in ecological terms. On an analytical level the case study explorations indicate that a manager’s consistent performance of a leadership style stimulates the project’s ecological innovativeness when the manager also injects the project with ecological information, knowledge and competence. It also indicates that a manager’s consistent performance of a leadership style, without an injection of information, knowledge and competence in the project, does not stimulate the project’s ecological innovativeness.

Citation

Bossink, B.A.G. (2004), "Effectiveness of innovation leadership styles: a manager’s influence on ecological innovation in construction projects", Construction Innovation, Vol. 4 No. 4, pp. 211-228. https://doi.org/10.1108/14714170410815105