Enhancing employee creativity via individual skill development and team knowledge sharing: Influences of dual‐focused transformational leadership

• Author: Zhi‐Xue Zhang,Kathryn M. Bartol,Chenwei Li,Yuntao Dong
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2134
• Date: 01 March 2017
• Published date: 01 March 2017

Enhancing employee creativity via individual skill

development and team knowledge sharing:

Influences of dual-focused transformational

leadership

YUNTAO DONG

1

*, KATHRYN M. BARTOL

2

, ZHI-XUE ZHANG

3

AND CHENWEI LI

4†

1

University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut, U.S.A.

2

University of Maryland, College Park, College Park, Maryland, U.S.A.

3

Peking University, Beijing, China

4

San Francisco State University, San Francisco, California, U.S.A.

Summary Addressing the challenges faced by team leaders in fostering both individual and team creativity, this research

developed and tested a multilevel model connecting dual-focused transformational leadership (TFL) and

creativity and incorporating intervening mechanisms at the two levels. Using multilevel, multisource survey

data from individual members, team leaders, and direct supervisors in high-technology firms, we found that

individual-focused TFL had a positive indirect effect on individual creativity via individual skill develop-

ment, whereas team-focused TFL impacted team creativity partially through its influence on team knowledge

sharing. We also found that knowledge sharing constituted a cross-level contextual factor that moderated the

relationship among individual-focused TFL, skill development, and individual creativity. We discuss the

theoretical and practical implications of this research and offer suggestions for future research. Copyright

© 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Keywords: transformational leadership; employee creativity; skill development; knowledge sharing;

multilevel

Employee creativity, defined as the generation of novel and useful ideas (Amabile, 1988; Zhou & Shalley, 2003), is

critical to organizational survival and effectiveness. There has been increasing research interest in examining what

leaders might do to encourage the production of creative outcomes (Anderson, Potočnik, & Zhou, 2014). For leaders

of teams, in particular, this can present a special challenge. On the one hand, ideas are ultimately offered up by

individuals, and hence, it is useful for leaders to develop individuals' knowledge and skills needed for creativity.

On the other hand, related research suggests that team creativity is more than the sum of its individual parts and

requires the exchange of knowledge among team members. Emphasizing promoting individuals' development (Dvir,

Eden, Avolio, & Shamir, 2002) while encouraging collective contribution (Eisenbeiss, Van Knippenberg, &

Boerner, 2008), transformational leadership (TFL) is particularly well suited to set in motion appropriate processes

at both the individual and team levels to handle this dual challenge.

Yet, in a recent meta-analysis, Rosing, Frese, and Bausch (2011) have pointed to inconsistencies in the research

on TFL–creativity relationship and suggested that the high degree of variation found in the relationship may be due

to the lack of clarification of the levels of analyses. In fact, recent theoretical advancements regarding TFL posit that

effective transformational leaders have different emphases when managing individuals and teams (Li, Mitchell, &

Boyle, 2016; Li, Shang, Liu, & Xi, 2014; Wang & Howell, 2010; Wu, Tsui, & Kinicki, 2010), with some behaviors

*Correspondence to: Yuntao Dong, University of Connecticut, 2100 Hillside Road, Unit 1041, Storrs, CT 06269, U.S.A. E-mail: yuntao.

dong@business.uconn.edu

†

This research was initiated when Professor Chenwei Li was at Indiana University - Purdue University Fort Wayne, Fort Wayne, Indiana, U.S.A.

Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Received 28 May 2015

Revised 30 July 2016, Accepted 10 August 2016

Journal of Organizational Behavior, J. Organiz. Behav. 38, 439–458 (2017)

Published online 14 September 2016 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/job.2134

Research Article

most meaningfully targeted at individuals (individual-focused TFL) and other behaviors more properly directed to

the team (team-focused TFL). Thus, the dual-focused conceptualization of TFL may have the potential to advance

creativity research. Li et al. (2016) have made a first attempt to adopt dual-focused TFL in this realm by aiming to

predict innovation in teams. However, there is widespread recognition that innovation encompasses both idea

generation (creativity) and implementation, which are increasingly viewed as involving substantially different

dynamics and mechanisms (Anderson et al., 2014; Rosing et al., 2011). Hence, in this study, we focus squarely

on multilevel associations between dual-focused TFL and creativity.

Although TFL is recognized as an influential enabler for creativity, there have been diverse and mixed views on

what pathways a leader may take to affect individual and team creativity. One major line of research has pointed to

the role of the leader as a facilitator of follower creativity (Mainemelis, Kark, & Epitropaki, 2015). Here, we extend

that research stream by exploring the possibility that dual-focused TFL increases the prospect that the followers

themselves can step up to the creativity requirements of the job, while also stimulating the team toward greater

creativity production. Specifically, individual-focused TFL tends to “stimulate individuals to develop their own

skills”(Li et al., 2016, p. 4), while team-focused TFL motivates team members to offer information out of intentions

to benefit the collective (Zhang, Tsui, & Wang, 2011) and enables “transmission and sharing of knowledge”

(García-Morales, Lloréns-Montes, & Verdú-Jover, 2008, p. 300). Enhanced individual skills and knowledge sharing

may, in turn, help the individual and the group, respectively, enact their creative potential. Hence, individual skill

development and team knowledge sharing may be important mechanisms linking dual-focused TFL and creativity.

However, research has yet to examine these mechanisms simultaneously under a dual-focused framework. Ques-

tions remain regarding how dual-focused TFL may uniquely and synergistically impact individual and team creativ-

ity. This is important because, as Gong, Kim, Lee, and Zhu (2013, p. 844) have noted, “individuals must be brought

back into the study of team creativity”as team creativity depends on the foundational individual capability to

generate ideas. At the same time, as Gilson, Lim, Luciano, and Choi (2013) have claimed, individual development

and creativity are constantly shaped by team knowledge exchange. These arguments highlight the potential advan-

tages of integrating dual-focused TFL and creativity and the associated mechanisms in a multilevel framework.

Accordingly, we propose and test a theoretical model that examines how dual-focused TFL may influence

individual and team creativity via separate channels. Integrating the dual-focused TFL perspective and creativity

literature, we consider skill development at the individual level and knowledge sharing at the team level as the

mediating mechanisms. Further, in view of calls for understanding how the multilevel mediators of TFL may interact

with each other (Van Knippenberg & Sitkin, 2013), we investigate the cross-level influence of team knowledge

sharing on the individual-level relationships.

We aim to make three significant contributions. First, we examine the differential impacts of individual-focused and

team-focused TFL on creativity, demonstrating the utility of dual-focused TFL in the creativity realm. Second, by iden-

tifying individual skill development and team knowledge sharing as influence channels of individual-focused and

team-focused TFL, our study addresses the need for research on level-specific mechanisms that connect TFL to creativ-

ity (Van Knippenberg & Sitkin, 2013) and contributes to the broader literature on creative leadership with regard to the

different means through which a leader may facilitate multilevel creativity (Mainemelis et al., 2015). Third, by

simultaneously examining the multilevel mediators, we are able to provide insights regarding the cross-level effects

on individual creativity while bringing a conceptual and empirical integration to “findings related to the differentiated

effects of team dynamics and individual contributions”on employee creativity (Li et al., 2016, p. 2).

Theory and Hypotheses

In this section, we trace the development of our model by first explicating a dual-focused conceptualization of TFL.

We next examine the mediating relationships explaining how individual-focused TFL boosts employee creativity via

enhancing individual skill development and how team-focused TFL fosters team creativity via promoting team

440 Y. DONG ET AL.

Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J. Organiz. Behav. 38, 439–458 (2017)

DOI: 10.1002/job