When Empowering Leadership Fosters Creative Performance: the Role of Problem Solving Demands and Creative Personality

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the circumstances under which empowering leadership fosters creative performance. Arguments were developed for a three-way interaction of empowering leadership, problem solving demands and creative personality in this linkage. These arguments resulted in competing hypotheses from a fit and a compensation perspective. The results from a survey of 213 employees of a Flemish large industrial organization were used. We found that less creative employees in jobs with high problem solving demands particularly benefit from empowering leadership. This paper adds to a more complex understanding of the effectiveness of empowering leadership by highlighting the relevance of the simultaneous interplay of contextual and personal factors.

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