Transformational leadership and employee creativity&mdash;The mediating role of pressure

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Science Research Management ›› 2015, Vol. 36 ›› Issue (8) : 112-119.

Transformational leadership and employee creativity—The mediating role of pressure

Cai Yahua¹, Jia Liangding², Wan Guoguang³

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Abstract

The influence of leadership in the employee creativity is an important topic for the organizational management research. The present research provides the possible theoretical explanations to the proposition that transformational leadership promotes the employee leadership, but the empirical results are inconsistent. In this paper, we try to identify the "dark side" of transformational leadership on creativity. By exploring the mediating role of pressure between transformational leadership and creativity, we find that challenging work, one type of pressure, mediates the positive relationship between transformational leadership and creativity; but more importantly, workload pressure as other type of pressure, mediates the negative relationship between transformational leadership and creativity. In a two-wave study of 905 employees nested in 205 work units from 65 high-technology firms in China, the random coefficient model results support the "dark side" view that transformational leadership may have impedimental effect on creativity through influencing workload pressure of followers. In a bunch of literature which extols favorable aspects of transformational leadership, our paper contributes to the research on dark side of transformational leadership.

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transformational leadership / creativity / challenging work / workload pressure

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Cai Yahua, Jia Liangding, Wan Guoguang. Transformational leadership and employee creativity—The mediating role of pressure[J]. Science Research Management. 2015, 36(8): 112-119

References

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