creativity and innovation research to identify potentially relevant leader behaviours (see below).
Some previous studies treated employees’ innovative behaviour as a one-dimensional construct that encompasses both idea generation and application behaviour (Scott and Bruce, 1994; Janssen, 2000). This implies that differences in relevant leader behaviours between the two phases remain invisible, which is why recent work recommends keeping these phases of the innovation process separate (Mumford and Licuanan, 2004). We follow this suggestion and address both idea generation and application.
2.2 Leadership
The term leadership means different things to different people. Although no ultimatedefinition of leadership exists (Yukl, 2002), the majority of definitions of leadership reflect some basic elements, including “group” “influence” and “goal” (Bryman, 1992).
We think of leadership as the process of influencing others towards achieving some kind of desired outcome.
Leadership research has taken different perspectives, leader traits, behaviours, and the influence of situational characteristics on leader effectiveness, for example, have all been studied. In the past 20 years, transformational and charismatic leadership approaches have gained in popularity (Den Hartog and Koopman, 2001). We limit ourselves to the behavioural perspective and address how leader behaviour influences employees’ idea generation and application behaviour. Although the impact of leaders seems intuitively appealing, most behavioural leadership studies look at performance or effective outcomes rather than innovation-related outcomes.
Available research on the relationship between leader behaviour and individual innovation has investigated transformational leadership, participative leadership, and leader-member exchange (LMX) theory. Transformational leadership is hypothesized to encourage creativity (Kahai et al., 2003; Shin and Zhou, 2003). As transformational leaders stimulate followers to view problems in new ways and help them to develop to their full potential, this is likely to result in the enhanced creativity of followers. However, previous studies show mixed results. Kahai et al. (2003) used an electronic meeting system with students in a laboratory experiment to investigate the impact of leadership, anonymity and rewards on creativity-relevant processes and outcomes. As a by-product they found a positive impact of transformational leadership. However, an experiment by Jaussi and Dionne (2003) found little effect of transformational leadership on creativity. In contrast, field research by Shin and Zhou (2003) in Korea showed that transformational leadership was positively related to follower creativity. Participative leadership involves the use of various decision-making procedures that determine the extent to which people can influence the leader’s decisions and have the autonomy to design and perform their own tasks. Participative leadership can take different forms, including consultation, joint decision making and delegation(Yukl, 2002). Such leadership has been identified as an antecedent of individual innovation. Judge et al. (1997), for example, interviewed R&D managers, scientists, and technicians from new biotechnology firms and concluded that giving employees operational autonomy encouraged an innovative culture. In a study among the employees of a manufacturing plant, Axtell et al. (2000) found a positive relationship bet
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