Inspirational leadership, positive mood, and team innovation: A moderated mediation investigation into the pivotal role of professional salience

• Date: 01 May 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/hrm.21951
• Published date: 01 May 2019
• Author: Brendan Boyle,Rebecca Mitchell

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Inspirational leadership, positive mood, and team innovation:

A moderated mediation investigation into the pivotal role of

professional salience

Rebecca Mitchell

1

| Brendan Boyle

2

1

Faculty of Business and Economics,

Department of Management, Macquarie

University, Sydney, New South Wales,

Australia

2

University of Newcastle, Department of

Management, Sydney, New South Wales,

Australia

Correspondence

Rebecca Mitchell, Faculty of Business and

Economics, Macquarie University, Sydney,

NSW, Australia.

Email: rebecca.mitchell@mq.edu.au

[The copyright line for this article was changed

on 15 February 2019 after original online

publication]

Multidisciplinary teams are increasingly advocated for in healthcare policy consequent to their

capacity to develop innovative solutions to seemingly intractable service and care challenges.

Recent arguments that inspirational leadership styles may foster innovation in multidisciplinary

teams point to their potential value in this effort. However, inconsistency in the capacity of such

leaders to engender innovation highlights the need to understand the mechanisms and bound-

ary conditions that determine when such leadership generates positive effects. We argue that

follower positive mood acts to mediate the path between inspirational leadership and innova-

tion and may account for its variable effects. By increasing positive team mood, inspirational

leaders can potentially bring about more flexible thinking and enhance innovation but can also

increase reliance on less effortful information processing, undermining innovative potential. In

an effort to address the dilemma posed by these contrasting effects, we propose that profes-

sional salience acts as an important boundary condition of this relationship such that only when

profession is salient do inspirational leaders enhance multidisciplinary team innovation through

positive mood. An analysis of survey data from 60 UK-based multidisciplinary healthcare teams,

investigating the inspirational leadership of practice-based innovation, supports our moderated

mediation model. Finally, the implications for HRM are considered, specifically for leader devel-

opment and work team design.

KEYWORDS

healthcare teams, inspirational leadership, multidisciplinary teams, professional salience, team

leadership, team mood

1|INSPIRATIONAL LEADERSHIP OF TEAM

INNOVATION

Organizations value multidisciplinary teams for their ability to address

complex issues that demand innovative solutions (Eisenbeiss, van

Knippenberg, & Boerner, 2008; Hülsheger, Anderson, & Salgado,

2009). Multidisciplinary teams provide a context that is especially well

suited to innovation, defined as the intentional introduction of new

ideas, services, or processes (West & Farr, 1990), because they facili-

tate interactions between members with different knowledge and per-

spectives, potentially enabling the combination of different insights

(Anderson & West, 1998; Drach-Zahavy & Somech, 2001; Hülsheger

et al., 2009). In light of this, human resource (HR) managers have an

enduring attentiveness to how work can be designed to include

teams, specifically multidisciplinary teams, driven by a consciousness

that work design has been shown to influence a host of interpersonal,

attitudinal, behavioral, cognitive, and organizational outcomes

(Morgeson & Humphrey, 2008).

In healthcare, the capacity of multidisciplinary teams—that is,

teams comprised of different professions (Mitchell & Boyle, 2015)—to

develop innovative solutions to complex patient- and service-related

challenges (e.g., Dias & Escoval, 2013; Salge & Vera, 2009) has led to

their increased utilization and advocacy in public policy as a work

design (e.g., Naylor et al., 2015). Moreover, research aimed at

DOI: 10.1002/hrm.21951

Hum Resour Manage. 2019;58:269–283. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/hrm © 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 269