The nexus between servant leadership and employee's creative deviance for creativity inside learning and performance goal-oriented organizations
ISSN: 0025-1747
Article publication date: 18 July 2023
Issue publication date: 10 May 2024
Abstract
Purpose
This study, based on motivated information processing theory and theories of leadership (contingency and functional), investigates how servant leadership (SL) could be an effective leadership style for employee creative deviance engagement (CDE) to foster radical (RC) and incremental creativity (IC) in two different goal-oriented organizations: learning (LGO) and performance (PGO) goal-oriented organizations.
Design/methodology/approach
This study employed descriptive and comparative approaches and surveyed two sources (leaders and team members). Using multi-source data involving 486 LGO-based and 498 PGO-based employee–supervisor dyads from 104 LGO-based and 104 PGO-based high-tech firms in China, the authors distinguish comparative support for assumed hypotheses by using the Monte Carlo simulation technique for the indirect effects and Mplus for multilevel path analysis.
Findings
The study outcomes found that SL transmits the effects of employee CDE directly and nurtures RC and IC indirectly. It identified that an organization's LGO strengthens the direct and indirect relationships between SL and creativity via employee's CDE when the organization's LGO is high. However, an organization's PGO strengthens the direct relationship when it's low and strengthens the indirect link between SL and IC when it's high. In addition, the organization's PGO demonstrated an insignificant effect on the indirect relationship between SL and RC.
Originality/value
This study is the first to verify SL as the specific leadership style for responding employee's CDE and identify its distinctive effects on RC and IC. Additionally, there has been no effort to associate SL with employee's CDE for nurturing distinctive types of creativity under the different organizational dispositions (LGO and PGO).
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge the support from the Key Program of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71832004) and the Philosophy and Social Science Research of the Ministry of Education (21JZD056).
Citation
Kumar, N., Jin, Y. and Liu, Z. (2024), "The nexus between servant leadership and employee's creative deviance for creativity inside learning and performance goal-oriented organizations", Management Decision, Vol. 62 No. 4, pp. 1117-1137. https://doi.org/10.1108/MD-09-2022-1294
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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