مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد اثرات جاری رهبری ادراک شده بر خلاقیت کارکنان – اسپرینگر 2018

Introduction

Over the past decades, the far-reaching effects of an increasing number of business scandals (e.g., Enron, WorldCom) and the more recent global financial crisis of 2006–2009 have repeatedly highlighted the importance of ethical practices in corporations (Brenker 2010). During the recent financial crisis, nearly 26 million people in the US were out of work and US$11 trillion of wealth disappeared (Dallas 2012). As leaders typically set the standards for behavior in the workplace and then create situations and cultures that influence employee and organizational outcomes, people usually attribute scandals and unethical behavior in corporations to the lack of leader integrity, both at the upper management level and at the lower work team level (Sims and Brinkmann 2002). Scholars have demonstrated that leader integrity is not only effective in preventing ethical meltdowns in organizations (Sims and Brinkmann 2003), but is also the key to leadership and organizational effectiveness and growth (Kannan-Narasimhan and Lawrence 2012). Studies have shown that leader integrity is positively related to subordinates’ positive attitudes (e.g. organizational commitment, job satisfaction, and well-being. See Simons et al. 2015; Davis and Rothstein 2006; Prottas 2008, 2013), organizational citizenship behavior (e.g. Dineen et al. 2006), and performance (e.g. Simons et al. 2015; Palanski and Yammarino 2011; Leroy et al. 2012b), and negatively related to subordinates’ tendencies toward deviant behavior (e.g. Dineen et al. 2006) and absenteeism (Prottas 2008). One study even found that integrity is the single best predictor of ratings of trust in leaders (Morgan 1989). However, empirical research on leader integrity is in its infancy. Integrity is a new and promising area for research (Simons et al. 2011). The relationship between leader integrity and employee creativity has rarely been discussed. Today’s organizations heavily depend on creative ideas from employees to build a competitive edge as work becomes increasingly knowledge-based and dynamic (George 2007). Scholars and practitioners share a strong interest in understanding how leadership fosters or prohibits employee creativity (Hennessey and Amabile 2010). Therefore, it is of both theoretical and empirical importance to illuminate the influence of leader integrity—an axiomatic characteristic of effective leadership (Simons 2002; Palanski and Yammarino 2009)—on employee creativity as well as the buffering factors for this influence. Thus, the first purpose of this study is to integrate and extend research on leadership and creativity to investigate whether leader integrity fosters employee creativity in teams. In addition, regardless of the management level, the atmosphere or culture that a leader sets has an effect on the behavior of his/her followers (White and Lean 2008). The integrity of leaders at all levels of a hierarchy is critical for overall organizational health and reputation (Kannan-Narasimhan and Lawrence 2012; Simons et al. 2007). As an emerging perspective, the cascading effect of role modeling from higher-level leaders to lower-level leaders has received considerable empirical support in the leadership literature (e.g. Mayer et al. 2009). For example, Liu et al. (2012) demonstrated that department leader abusive supervision triggers team leader abusive supervision and subsequently influences employee creativity. Social learning theory (SLT) provides a solid rationale for this trickledown effect, whereby leaders at a lower level of a hierarchy may mimic and display the behavior of leaders at a higher hierarchical level.