5 Leader Behaviors and Employee Creativity

Taking Stock of the Current State of Research

Christina E. Shalley and G. James Lemoine

Introduction

There have been a number of empirical studies focused on leadership behaviors and creativity. In fact, leadership may be the very most examined contextual predictor of creativity in the literature, and fairly consistent findings have emerged across empirical studies. In this chapter, we first review research representative of the major findings concerning how leader behaviors can facilitate employee creativity. This review is not exhaustive, but we believe it is reflective of the research that has been conducted to date on individual level creativity. Recently, Mainemelis, Kark, and Epitropaki (2015) precisely conceptualized creative leadership, and in reviewing prior research, they categorized it into three main conceptualizations. Their first conceptualization, which they labeled Facilitating, dealt with how leaders can help to foster or hinder employee creativity. Our piece fits squarely within this conceptualization. As Mainemelis and colleagues (2015) pointed out, central to the Facilitating conceptualization is what leaders can do to foster employee creativity, as well as how leaders can support employees’ creativity.

The leadership literature features many different ‘styles’ or ‘approaches’ to leadership, each with their own relevant leader behaviors. In organizing this brief review, we first categorize the various leadership styles common in the literature, and then we discuss some of the major empirical findings for each of these categories. We discovered five main categories of leadership styles and behaviors within which research on creativity as an outcome has been conducted. The first category has received the most research attention and encompasses the transformational and charismatic paradigms, including transactional leadership as a component of the ‘full-range leadership model’ (Bass, 1985). Another subset of research, which we call ‘participative leadership,’ involves leadership behaviors aimed at activating subordinate involvement and initiative, such as participative, inclusive, and empowering leadership. Contrarily, a third category of leadership behaviors represents styles which maintain power for the leader him or herself, including authoritarian and directive leadership. The fourth category involves morally focused leadership behaviors, which include both normatively moral (i.e., authentic, ethical, and servant) and immoral (i.e., abusive) leader styles. The final category emerging in our review involves more general leadership behaviors, unconnected to any specific style.¹

After providing an overall summary of the general findings across these categories, we discuss implications of the collective body of work on leader behavior and employee creativity, and derive from our review some potential new research questions and directions.

Transformational/Charismatic Leadership

Research in this stream often contrasts a ‘transformational leader’ or a charismatic individual who serves as a motivating and developing role model for employees, with a ‘transactional leader,’ which might involve contingent reward leadership based on incentives or punishments, or might alternatively represent the absence of leadership altogether (Bass, 1985). Of these leadership types, by far the most work has emerged linking creativity to transformational leadership. In general, transformational leadership is positively associated with creativity, and it has been suggested that organizations may want to train managers to be more transformational in how they lead their employees or use personality testing to identify those who are more likely to serve as transformational leaders (e.g., Jyoti & Dev, 2015). Given that the results of two meta-analyses revealed the positive association between transformational leadership and employee creativity (Hammond et al., 2011; Wang et al., 2011), much of the more recent empirical work has been focused on identifying mediators and moderating conditions of this relationship. For example, Qu, Janssen, and Shi (2015) sought to identify why and when transformational leadership is positively related to employee creativity. They hypothesized that employees’ relational identification with leaders could be an underlying mechanism, which might vary by the employees’ perceptions of leaders’ creativity expectations. Using a Chinese field sample they found support for these hypotheses. Shin and Zhou (2003), in a multi-organizational field design, found that transformational leadership was positively related to employee creativity, and that followers’ conservation (i.e., a value) moderated this relationship. They also found that intrinsic motivation mediated the interaction of transformational leadership and followers’ conservation, and partially mediated the contribution of transformational leadership to employee creativity.

As for other contingencies, Jyoti and Dev (2015) argued and found a moderating role played by learning orientation in the relationship between transformational leadership and employee creativity. Cheung and Wong (2011) hypothesized that leaders’ task and relational support would moderate the relationship between transformational leadership and followers’ creativity, and their results indicated that when there was high leader task and relational support, this positive effect was strengthened.

Some research has simultaneously examined the effects of transformational and transactional leadership on creativity. For example, in an experimental study Herrmann and Felfe (2014) tested the moderating effects of task novelty and personal initiative on the relationships between transformational and transactional leadership and creativity. They found that transformational leadership precipitated higher creativity than transactional leadership, and high-task novelty produced higher creativity than low task novelty. They also found that the positive effect of transformational leadership on creativity was stronger when the task was highly novel and personal initiative was high.

In a promising and different approach, Eisenbeiss and Boerner (2013) argued that attention to the positive effects of transformational and charismatic leadership had obscured our understanding of potential negative effects on creativity for these forms of leadership. They tested this idea in a field study involving R&D workers. Developing an integrative framework on the parallel positive and negative effects of transformational leadership and employee creativity, their results indicated that transformational leadership is positively associated with employee creativity. However, it also increases employees’ dependency on their leader, which can subsequently reduce their creativity.

One study that focused on transactional leadership by Hussain and colleagues (2017) examined its impact on organizational creativity through the underlying mechanism of knowledge sharing behavior between leaders and employees. Using a field telecom sample, they investigated the effect of offering a contingent reward for knowledge sharing, and they found that knowledge sharing mediated the positive association between transactional leadership and organizational creativity.

Similar results have emerged in studies of charismatic leadership, which generally find that leaders who act as role models and clearly articulate visions tend to boost creative performance. For instance, in an experimental study, Lovelace and Hunter (2013) found that charismatic leaders stimulate subordinate creative performance over and above pragmatic or ideological leaders on middle-stage creative tasks as opposed to early or later stage creative tasks.

Participative Leadership

Other leadership behaviors focus on getting employees involved and supporting their initiative, which may be particularly relevant for creativity. Tung and Yu (2016) examined the role of participative and supportive leadership for enhancing employee creativity through the mediating mechanism of enhanced employee promotion focus. They further argued that instrumental leadership would induce a prevention focus that also would enhance employee creativity. Their Taiwanese field study supported these arguments, suggesting that leaders with very different styles were all able to enhance creativity through distinct mechanisms.

Zhang and Bartol (2010) examined the effect of empowering leadership on employee creativity. They viewed empowering leadership as a process that creates a work context in which employees feel that they can share power with their managers. They stated that empowering leaders give employees autonomy, indicate that they have confidence in their ability to perform their work, try to remove any obstacles that could prevent them from performing effectively, and stress the meaning and importance of the work. In a study of IT professionals and their supervisors in China, they found that empowering leadership positively affected psychological empowerment, impacting both intrinsic motivation and creative process engagement, and in turn increasing employee creativity. They also found that empowerment role identity moderated the link between empowering leadership and psychological empowerment, and leaders’ encouragement of creativity moderated the connection between creative process engagement and psychological empowerment.

Using an interesting contingent contextual approach, Harris and colleagues (2014) conducted two studies that focused on newcomers to the organization. Specifically, they examined how empowering leaders, newcomer trust in these leaders, and organizational support for creativity were associated with employee creativity. In their first study they found relationships between empowering leadership and creativity, which became stronger contingent upon perceived organizational support for creativity. In Study 2, however, they discovered that this perceived organizational support for creativity was a less important moderator of creative process engagement than the amount of trust the newcomers had in management. In a related finding, Zhang and Zhou (2014) found that empowering leadership had the strongest relation to employee creativity when the employees trusted their supervisors, and they had high uncertainty avoidance, with creative self-efficacy mediating this effect.

Taking a different approach, Dong and colleagues (2015) found that customers’ empowering behaviors, such as their placing faith in employees and supporting their autonomy, were positively related to service employees’ creativity, and this effect was mediated through service employees’ state promotion focus. They also found that both customers’ and supervisors’ empowering behavior worked synergistically in their relationship with employee creativity.

Inclusive leaders who are open, accessible, and available to their employees have also been shown to facilitate employee creativity. For example, Carmeli, Reiter-Palmon, and Ziv (2010) found that inclusive leadership was positively related to employees’ perceptions of psychological safety, which contributed to greater employee involvement in their creative work.

Authoritarian/Directive Leadership

In general, ‘controlling supervision’ styles such as authoritarian or directive leadership have been found to be negatively associated with employee creativity (e.g., Oldham & Cummings, 1996), although such research is somewhat rare. Much of this work has focused more on supportive or non-controlling supervision rather than controlling supervision. An interesting study by Wang and colleagues (2013) focused on how authoritarian and benevolent leadership styles interacted with the sex of the leaders. They studied a predominantly male R&D department and contrasted it with a predominantly female customer service division. They found that the negative relationship between an authoritarian leadership style and subordinate performance, including task performance, creativity, and citizenship behavior, was stronger for female rather than male leaders. On the other hand, they found that benevolent leadership was positively related to employee performance and this effect was stronger for male leaders as opposed to female leaders.

Moral Leadership

A fourth stream of leadership research deals with behaviors and styles centered on morality (or the lack thereof) in which leaders are guided primarily by their moral identities (Aquino & Reed, 2002). Ethical leadership, for instance (Brown, Treviño, & Harrison, 2005), is commonly viewed as a positive predictor of creativity, and most research on this relationship has sought to identify its underlying mechanisms. For example, two studies have investigated the mediating role of psychological empowerment in the relationship between ethical leadership and follower creativity. Both studies were in the Pakistani context: one of doctors in a large public hospital (Chughtai, 2016) and one of supervisor-subordinate dyads working in hotels (Javed et al., 2017). Both found mediated relationships of ethical leadership on creativity through psychological empowerment, with the latter also finding support for leader-member exchange as a full mediator.

Voice and knowledge sharing serve as other salient precursors of creativity, similar to empowerment in that if employees do not feel empowered, they may not speak up or share knowledge. Chen and Hou (2016) proposed that the voice behavior of employees serves as an underlying mechanism in the relationship between ethical leadership and employee creativity. In a Taiwanese R&D sample, they found that there was a positive relationship between employee perceptions of ethical leadership and employees’ voice behavior. Voice behavior was related to employee creativity, and the indirect effect of ethical leadership on creativity through voice behavior was stronger when the employees worked in a more innovative climate. Finally, Ma et al. (2013) examined the mediating role of knowledge sharing and self-efficacy in the relationship between ethical leadership and employee creativity in a Chinese field study. They found support for knowledge sharing and self-efficacy as mediating mechanisms.

Servant leadership (Liden et al., 2008) represents an alternative approach to moral leadership focused on stakeholders. Liden and colleagues (2014) tested a model in which servant leaders developed a ‘serving culture’ and found that this type of culture had a positive effect on employee creativity. Neubert and colleagues (2008) hypothesized and found support for employees’ promotion focus as a mediator of the relationship between servant leadership and employee creative behavior. Eight years later, Neubert and his colleagues (2016) once again found that servant leadership was positively related to employees’ creative behavior and that the organizational structure moderated this relationship through employee satisfaction.

There is also support for relationships between creativity and authentic leadership, which focuses on the leader’s own self-awareness and self-concordance (Gardner et al., 2005). For example, Rego et al. (2012, 2014) found support for psychological capital, its component of hope, and positive affect as mediators linking authentic leadership and employee creativity. Similarly, Semedo and colleagues (2016, 2017) concluded that authentic leadership boosted creativity through affective well-being and resourcefulness.

On the opposite end of the moral leadership spectrum, abusive supervision reflects an immoral approach to leadership (Tepper, 2007). Research linking abusive supervision with creativity is somewhat rare, but what does exist points to its negative effect. For example, Liu and colleagues (2016) identified two sequential mechanisms underlying the effect of abusive supervision on employee creativity. In a multi-source, time lagged study, they found support for their proposition that abusive supervision worked through psychological safety, which then affected organizational identification, which in turn impacted creativity. In a very novel study, Liu, Liao, and Loi (2012) focused on how and when department leaders’ abusive supervision can flow down organizational levels to undermine employee creativity. They found that team leaders’ abusive supervision mediated the negative relationship between department leaders’ abusive supervision and individual team members’ creativity. They hypothesized and found that team leaders’ and members’ attributions for their own supervisors’ motives for being abusive (i.e., performance-promotion and injury-initiation) determined the extent to which team leaders’ abusive supervision explained the effect of department leaders’ abusive supervision on employee creativity.

General Leadership Behaviors

There have been a number of studies that have not focused specifically on any particular leadership style, but instead examined the general role of leaders’ behaviors for facilitating employees’ creativity. For example, broadly supportive leadership has been found to be related to employee creativity. This type of leadership can take a number of forms (e.g., clearly specifying the goals for their job or offering help) and seems to operate through enhancing employees’ intrinsic motivation, positive affect, or their feelings of psychological safety (e.g., George & Zhou, 2007; Madjar, Oldham, & Pratt, 2002; Zhang & Bartol, 2010). For example, in a longitudinal study of knowledge workers using daily surveys, Amabile and colleagues (2004) examined both the positive (e.g., conveying intellectual and technical competence) and negative (e.g., close monitoring) leadership behaviors that were associated with employee creativity. Similarly, Oldham and Cummings (1996) found that employees that were supervised in supportive and non-controlling ways had higher levels of creativity than those supervised in a more controlling fashion.

Carmeli, Gelbard, and Reiter-Palmon (2013) in two studies demonstrated that leader supportive behaviors impacted employee creativity, both directly and indirectly through facilitating knowledge sharing and employee creative problem solving. Wu and colleagues (2008) found that leaders’ promotion focused behaviors were positively related to employee creativity. Redmond, Mumford, and Teach (1993) experimentally manipulated three leader behaviors that they hypothesized would facilitate their followers’ creativity. These behaviors contributed to employee problem construction, developing learning goals, and building their feelings of self-efficacy. They found that leader behaviors that contributed to problem construction and feelings of self-efficacy increased follower creativity. Venkataramani and colleagues (2014) found that leaders’ social networks affected their employees’ radical creativity. Specifically, they argued that when the leader is a critical liaison (i.e., between-centrality) in information exchange and interactions, this can facilitate their employees’ creativity. Finally, Tierney and Farmer (2004) focused on the Pygmalion process for the creativity of R&D employees. They found that when supervisors had higher expectations for employee creativity, their employees perceived that they were more supportive of creativity, and creative self-efficacy mediated the effect of supervisor expectations, supervisors’ behaviors and employees’ views on creative performance.

There have been a few studies that have looked at the role of leaders’ creativity as predictors of employees’ creativity (e.g., Mathisen, Einarsen, & Mykletun, 2012). For example, Koseoglu, Liu, and Shalley (2017) used role identity theory to argue that leaders who are creative themselves can serve as potential role models for their employees’ creativity via helping to enhance their employees’ creative role identity. They examined this in a Chinese sample and their hypotheses were supported, indicating that the creative behaviors of leaders themselves are worthy of further attention. In an interesting experimental study, Jaussi and Dionne (2003) looked at the relationship of leaders’ unconventional behavior (e.g., standing on furniture) and their followers’ creativity. They found that unconventional behavior positively and significantly interacted with followers’ perceptions of their leader as being a role model to positively predict their creativity.

Implications for Leader Behaviors and Creativity, and Future Research Directions

Overall, our review of the extant empirical literature suggests that leaders not only have a positive impact on employee creativity, but virtually any marginally positive leadership behavior seems to precipitate creativity. It seems that a leader can be charismatic or transactional; empowering or focused on ethical compliance; servant, educational, or creative themselves; and any of these behaviors (and many others) increase employee creativity. With few exceptions, the research reviewed painted a positive picture of leader behavior and creativity, with very few studies proposing or finding negative, mixed, or nonsignificant relationships. Given the long-standing proposition by theorists of creativity being infrequent, unusual, and even rare (Sternberg & Lubart, 1991; Vincent & Kouchaki, 2016), it seems somewhat contradictory to conclude that virtually anything a leader does might serve to substantially increase employee creativity. Although leadership is expected to have meaningful effects on employee attitudes and behaviors, does this conclusion stretch the power of leadership too far?

One resolution for this question might be to conclude that creativity is not as rare as some have expected. Indeed, some scholars have concluded that this is the case, arguing that whereas individuals capable of truly groundbreaking creativity are seldom encountered, creativity exists in the everyday sense in ‘normal people’ as well (Mayer, 1999). This might be best captured by research distinguishing ‘radical’ or breakthrough creativity of wholly new processes and products, from ‘incremental’ or minor creativity providing relatively small tweaks and edits (Madjar, Greenberg, & Chen, 2011). Some scholars have suggested that radical creativity might be far less prevalent in organizations than incremental creativity (Lemoine, Shalley, & Xu, 2017), and if this is true, it’s plausible that most leader behaviors have their strongest impact on incremental creativity. Which leader behaviors, then, might affect groundbreaking radical creativity?

A second explanation for the question of how virtually every leader behavior might impact creativity would be a methodological effect, not dissimilar to a ‘halo effect’ in which evaluations of leader behaviors inadvertently tap creative characteristics or processes themselves. For instance, van Knippenberg and Sitkin (2013) have argued that studies of charismatic/transformational leadership should be interpreted while considering the items used to measure it, as those items are often conflated with outcomes. In the case of creativity, the MLQ (the most common operationalization of charismatic/transformational leadership) features items indicating that the leader “gets me to look at problems from many different angles” and “suggests new ways of looking at how to complete assignments,” (Bass & Avolio, 1989) both of which sound very much like part of the creative process. Other leadership operationalizations may feature similar issues in that leadership is measured as itself featuring creativity or known antecedents of creativity, such as items from empowering leadership scales like “encourages work group members to exchange information with one another” (Arnold et al., 2000) or servant leadership items such as “my manager can solve work problems with new or creative ideas” (Liden et al., 2008). If leadership measures themselves reflect creative processes, then the widespread relationship of leaders’ behaviors to creativity becomes less surprising; instead, it suggests tautology.

A third possible reason for these ubiquitous relationships might be that theory on the outcomes of leadership, and the antecedents of creativity, are often quite similar. Intrinsic motivation, for example, is often positioned as both one of the most salient outcomes of effective leadership (Burns, 1978), and as one of the three most important individual predictors of creativity (Amabile, 1996). Is it surprising, then, that leadership would impact creativity? If effective leadership creates trust, learning, and enhanced communication, all of which are established antecedents of creativity, then the idea that leadership and creativity might be linked becomes intuitive. This perspective would support the widespread results found in this review, as the exact content of the leader behaviors would matter much less than the simple question of whether or not exposure to the leader created motivation, trust, learning, and so on. In this case, it becomes intuitive that leadership should precipitate creativity.

This suggests the potential for a broad theoretical perspective of leadership and creativity, which might help to explain all of these research results. Such a theory-based approach could also shed light on the numerous mediators revealed in our review. Many of the mediators in these studies are either well-known antecedents of creativity or are themselves arguably components of collective creativity. We found that mediators in these studies are, overall, quite similar to one another, with many papers investigating mediators connected to (for instance) efficacy, empowerment, psychological safety, identification, trust, and commitment. Research studying these mediating mechanisms, or mediating mechanisms which are themselves part of creativity such as creative process engagement or speaking up, constitute nearly the entirety of the process models we reviewed. These similarities would seem to indicate an underlying theory: when conditions are created for enhanced efficacy and resources, or when they strengthen connections between the employee and their organization, enhanced creativity should result, as efficacy, resources, and connections should all provide the intrinsic motivation needed for creativity to flourish.

We expect that there is some truth to all three of these explanations helping to explain the results of our review, and consequently suggest that additional research merely indicating links between leader behaviors and creativity may have limited theoretical or practical value. Instead, we suggest scholars dive deeper into questions of which leader behaviors may more strongly precipitate creativity than others; when supposedly positive leader behaviors might hamper creativity or feasibly negative behaviors might enhance it; or what types of creativity certain leader behaviors might most strongly promote. Are any of these leader behaviors, for instance, truly capable of driving groundbreaking creativity in times of crisis? Does leadership, when operationalized in a manner devoid of inherent creative content and measured in a way accounting for any halo effects, still correlate with employee creativity? Perhaps most importantly, is there a simple underlying theory that might explain the links between all of these leader behaviors and creativity? We expect there is, and we repeat our suspicion here that perhaps we have missed the forest for the trees. It may well be that in general, positive leader behaviors build self-efficacy, increase resource availability, and enhance positive affect, in general and toward the organization, team, coworkers, and leader. All of these would be expected to boost an employee’s intrinsic motivation (Vroom, 1964), which in turn would motivate creativity (Amabile, 1996).

One promising avenue to build the ‘when’ of such a theory (Whetten, 1989) might be to consider that ‘when’ literally, and examine how leadership and creativity might affect each other temporally. This does not merely indicate potential for reciprocal effects of follower creativity on leader behaviors, although such an investigation might be promising in its alignment with recent developments in followership theory and the ‘co-production’ of leadership (Uhl-Bien et al., 2014). If followers can influence their leaders’ behaviors, would those changed leadership behaviors continue to promote creativity to the same degree that the original behaviors did? Would changes to leadership behaviors last, or fade over time? Temporal investigations might also examine, for instance, whether continued exposure to the same leadership behaviors continue to increase creativity beyond the initial amount, or if their effects on creativity diminish over time. Could a follower become so accustomed to an empowering leader, for example, that the leader’s impact on creativity fades? Or could the empowering leader have exponential effects over time, inspiring subordinates to redouble their creative efforts? Alternatively, do creativity-supported leader behaviors need to be maintained, or would relatively limited exposure be sufficient to drive some forms of creativity? How does exposure to multiple styles of leadership, or dramatically different leadership behaviors, affect creativity over time, and does the order of the behaviors, or the degree to which they are repeated, matter? Application of temporal theories and perspectives (Bluedorn & Denhardt, 1988; Mitchell & James, 2001) offer many promising and practically meaningful new research directions that might expand our understanding of how and when leadership behaviors impact creativity.

Our review of empirically investigated moderators of leadership’s effect on creativity revealed opportunities to more deeply explore contextual contingencies. The large majority of moderators we identified were personal rather than contextual, including followers’ individual differences, trust, ability, and emotion. Quite often, these moderators mirrored antecedents of creativity such as learning, motivation, and well-being. A much smaller number of studies examined contextual variables as potentially impacting the effectiveness of leadership in driving creativity. Although it is well established that both leadership and context affect creativity, and that their joint effects are important to consider (see Shalley & Gilson, 2004, for a review), little empirical work has investigated this promising area. Further, what work does exist accounting for contextual factors in the relationship between leadership and creativity most often examines similarly broad moderators such as ‘creativity climate’ or ‘climate for innovation.’ We suggest that there is a need to move beyond such panoptic and creativity-centric moderators to examine other contextual factors important for leadership to effectively grow creativity. Some evidence of this was found in our review; for instance, Li and colleagues (2016) found that task interdependence might enhance some negative effects of transformational leadership on individual innovation, and Murphy and Ensher’s (2008) qualitative examination of television production teams revealed that the organization’s structure, in terms of follower distance from leaders, represents an important contingency. It is likely that certain leadership behaviors are more effective at driving creativity in times of crisis than others and that job roles, or task and team characteristics, might render certain leadership behaviors more useful at certain times. Also, we may see differences across industries and nationalities. The joint effects of leadership and context are a promising area for further exploration, offering the potential for building more practically useful knowledge.

This deeper examination of leadership and creativity might also mandate an emphasis placed on the potential ‘dark side’ of leadership, to balance the overwhelmingly positive view of leadership and creativity that emerges in the current body of literature. We see this as having to do with investigating when seemingly positive forms of leadership can lead to unintended consequences, sometimes forming an unexpected paradox. Mainemelis and colleagues (2015) suggested that the examination of paradoxes in creativity research remain a relatively unexplored area. Some promising work within this stream has recently emerged, such as Shalley and Gilson’s (2017) investigation of the need for balancing standardization and creativity, and research on creative deviance which has found complex and varied relationships between different leader responses and subsequent creative behaviors (Lin, Mainemelis, & Kark, 2016). Eisenbeiss and Boerner’s (2013) work on the negative side effects of transformational leadership on employee creativity also fits within this general direction, and there are a number of avenues that could be examined to pursue similar ideas. When might leader charisma or creativity hinder subordinate creativity? Could well-intentioned leadership result in followers taking the wrong path, attempting a creative project too grand or sweeping for their abilities or authority, or engaging in processes which hinder rather than help creativity? For instance, leadership is often credited with building follower efficacy (e.g., Redmond, Mumford, & Teach, 1993) and self-esteem (Greenleaf, 1977). It is plausible that at very high levels of such variables, followers might resist creative endeavors, thinking that they already possess the needed answers. Similarly, the high levels of cohesion thought to result from positive leadership (e.g., Waldman & Yammarino, 1999) could lead teams to engage in ‘groupthink’ processes harmful to creativity. Even leadership’s positive impact on organizational commitment (e.g., Leroy, Palanski, & Simons, 2012) might cause followers to resist change, forgoing opportunities to creatively improve processes due to their belief that the organization is desirable in its existing state. An empowered team might not be motivated to use their autonomy to engage in creativity, or a team featuring shared leadership may not feel the authority to engage in creativity. In this manner, positive leader behaviors might, at certain times or at certain levels, suppress subordinate creativity.

Compilations of leader behaviors, as popularized in leadership ‘styles,’ might also have unintended consequences for creativity. Ethical leadership, for instance, prioritizes follower compliance with organizational norms, rules, and standards (Brown, Treviño, & Harrison, 2005). Although this form of leadership has been linked to creativity (e.g., Ma et al., 2013), it seems reasonable to conclude that a focus on compliance and rules might stifle divergent thought in some situations. Of course, research has indicated that some structure and standardization is beneficial for creativity (Gilson et al., 2005); with this in mind, could the more free-wheeling autonomy of participative and empowering leadership imply some limitations on creative outcomes? When might a leader’s moral focus, as exemplified by authentic, ethical, or servant leadership, hinder or even conflict with creative processes or outcomes? Given a certain context, which of the many leader behaviors outlined here would most effectively drive creative performance, and why?

In conclusion, the research linking leader behaviors to employee creativity is large and quite varied. We do not question that this body of literature as a whole has made meaningful contributions to our theoretical and conceptual understandings of how leadership and creativity relate. We argue, however, that we may now possess sufficient knowledge of leadership behaviors’ widespread positive impact on creativity and why they occur. Now is the time for more advanced theory building and operational refinement to determine not whether leadership impacts creativity, but under what conditions might leader behavior best impact creativity, and when.