Creative Leadership: A Multi-Context Conceptualization

^†The second and the third author contributed equally.

Abstract

Various streams of organizational research have examined the relationship between creativity and leadership, albeit using slightly different names such as “creative leadership”, “leading for creativity and innovation”, and “managing creatives”. In this article, we review this dispersed body of knowledge and synthesize it under a global construct of creative leadership, which refers to leading others toward the attainment of a creative outcome. Under this unifying construct, we classify three more narrow conceptualizations that we observe in the literature: facilitating employee creativity; directing the materialization of a leader's creative vision; and integrating heterogeneous creative contributions. After examining the contextual characteristics associated with the three conceptualizations, we suggest that they represent three distinct collaborative contexts of creative leadership. We discuss the theoretical implications of a multi-context framework of creative leadership, especially in terms of resolving three persisting problems in the extant literature: lack of definitional clarity, shortage of nuanced theories, and low contextual sensitivity.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Associate Editor David de Cremer and Editor Sim Sitkin for their thoughtful comments and suggestions during the preparation of this article.

ORCID

Charalampos Mainemelis http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1081-5898

Olga Epitropaki http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0683-5143

Notes

^† The second and the third author contributed equally.