Nonlinear relationsip between participative leadership and employees’ creative behavior

Purpose: The purpose of this research is to investigate the impact of participative leadership on team members’ creative behavior. Participative leadership is defined as a certain style of leadership in which all employees of the organization work together to make decisions and to arrange the role of each participants. Participative leadership is also known as democratic leadership, as everyone is encouraged to participate to group process and work. Employees’ creative behavior is known as the main engine of change and organization innovation which provides the competitive advantage for organizations to create the future. Research Design: A nonlinear research model was developed based on prior creativity and participative leadership research. We draw some research questions about vague and complicated effects of participative leader behavior from antecedent studies and developed hypothesis with j-shaped non-linear effect of participative leadership on employees’ creative behavior. We inferred this nonlinear characteristic of participative leader behavior from various research streams such as cognitive psychology and organizational behavior. Furthermore, to investigate the boundary condition of participative leadership we hypothesized moderating effect of employees’ perception of trust in their leaders. We anticipated that perception of the leader trust can play critical role between leaders’ behavior and employees’ behavior as boundary condition. Data and Methodology: Survey data were collected from 364 employees from 8 companies. Polynomial regression approach and response surface analysis were applied to test the research model. Results: Participative leadership significantly influence subordinates’ creative behavior and this relationship shows J-shaped non-linear characteristic as expected. Response surface analysis shows 3-dimensional facet of moderating effects of leader trust. Effect of participative leadership on employees’ creative behavior is stronger when the perception of trust in leadership is high. Conclusions: This research has research implications for how to investigate the complex nature of participative and empowering leadership. Non-linearity can be a useful alternative for interpreting complicated results about leadership effectiveness. This research has practical implication also for how to maximize leadership effectiveness to enhance members’ creativity and proactive behaviors. However, our dataset from Korean manufacturing companies might limit the generalizability of the findings and there can be common method bias in the data even if we tried to minimize it with discriminant validity.