Examining Relationships between Transformational Leadership and Employee Creativity and Innovation Performance: The Moderator Effects of Organizational Culture

Because creative and innovative performance (CI) has been well documented to increase an organization's ability to stay competitive and improve its top-line growth, organizations are keenly interested in CI predictors. Burns' Transformational leadership (TFL) theory would suggest that a TFL style could foster CI. Consistent with the theory, some investigators have found strong TFL associations with CI performance. However, contrary to TFL theory, a number of other investigators failed to find such a relationship or found a weak relationship. One possible reason for mixed findings is that relationships with TFL only enhance CI under certain conditions, which have not been fully investigated. A possible explanation as to why studies examining TFL and CI have not found a consistent relationship between these constructs is that an important moderator is not being taken into account. Theory suggests that organizational culture may play a significant role; TFL may only foster CI in certain organizational culture types. This study examined whether organizational culture moderates relationships between TFL and CI. A convenience sample of 147 working professionals from multiple Fortune 500 organizations participated in the study and was directed to an online survey website to complete measures of their organizations' cultures, their managers' leadership styles, and their own CI performance, as well as relevant control measures. Moderated multiple regression analysis was conducted to test the hypothesis that organizational culture moderates the relationship between TFL and CI performance. Adhocracy culture type moderated the relationship between levels of TFL and CI performance. For organizations with low adhocracy culture, CI performance remained the same across levels of TFL. On the other hand, organizations with high adhocracy culture had a strong TFL-CI performance relationship. Consequently, market culture type was a non-significant moderator for predicting TFL-CI performance relationships. The theoretical model in this study provides an important extension of TFL and organizational culture theories and greater understanding of how adhocracy culture interacts with TFL to influence employee CI performance. The current study provides researchers and practitioners with a better comprehension of how to achieve higher levels of CI performance given the interaction between TFL and adhocracy culture.