Ethical Leadership as a Double-edged Sword for Team Creativity: The Examination of Dual Mechanisms and a Leader’s Individualistic-collectivistic Orientation
Year: 2019
Type: dissertation
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: In modern organizations, team leaders are often expected to meet two demands – creativity and ethicality. By looking at how ethical leadership relates to team creativity, the current research investigates whether the two demands can be achieved simultaneously or conflict with each other. A comprehensive review of this literature revealed equivocal past findings of the relationship between ethical leadership and creativity. Some researchers have found a positive relationship, while others have found a non-significant or even negative relationship. The central goal of this research is to provide a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between ethical leadership and team creativity by organizing the inconsistent past findings into two contradictory mechanisms: team psychological safety and team norm conformity. In addition, this research investigates when ethical leaders help their teams attend to either of the two mechanisms by examining a leader’s individualism-collectivism. A field study conducted in a chemical company where 357 employees in 105 R teams participated provided mixed support for my hypotheses. I found that despite some inconsistency, team psychological safety generally played a positive mediating role of the relationship between ethical leadership and team creativity, while team norm conformity negatively mediated the relationship. In addition, a leader’s individualism-collectivism moderated these relationships such that teams led by individualistic ethical leaders were more likely to attend to the team psychological safety mechanism, while teams led by collectivistic ethical leaders were more likely to attend to the team norm conformity mechanism.
Source: TSpace (University of Toronto)
Author: Yeun Joon Kim
Language: English
Subfield: Social Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3091988050