A job demands-resources perspective on servant leadership and employee creativity

ABSTRACT

Based on job demands-resources theory, this study intends to investigate how and when servant leadership influences employee creativity by considering work engagement as a key mediator and two kinds of team conflict (i.e. relationship and task conflict) as moderators. Data was collected from 83 teams consisting of 466 employees from 11 banks in China. The results indicated that servant leadership is positively related to employee creativity. Moreover, this study found that work engagement partially mediates the positive relationship between servant leadership and employee creativity. Further, the results demonstrated that task conflict decrease the effect of servant leadership on work engagement. However, the moderating effect of relationship conflict is nonsignificant. Overall, the findings emphasize the value of considering the mediating role of work engagement and the moderating role of team conflict in a JD-R research model, which may further explain the association between servant leadership and employee creativity and guide future study.

摘要

本研究基于工作需求-资源理论（JD-R），探讨了服务型领导如何以及何时会影响员工创造力，尤其是工作投入在其中的中介作用，以及两种团队冲突（关系冲突和任务冲突）在其中的调节作用。通过对来自中国11家银行的83个团队、466名员工的调查数据分析发现，服务型领导与员工创造力呈显著正相关，工作投入在服务型领导与员工创造力之间发挥部分中介效应，任务冲突会弱化服务型领导对员工工作投入的作用，而关系冲突的调节作用并不显著。研究结论强调将工作投入的中介作用和团队冲突的调节作用引入JD-R研究模型的价值，有助于进一步厘清服务型领导与员工创造力的关系，并为未来研究提供参考。

KEYWORDS:

• Servant leadership
• employee creativity
• work engagement
• relationship conflict
• task conflict

关键词:

• 服务型领导
• 员工创造力
• 工作投入
• 关系冲突
• 任务冲突

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 72001100]; The Open Fund of Sichuan Province Cyclic Economy Research Center [grant number XHJJ-2217]; Humanities and Social Sciences Planning fund of the Ministry of Education of China [grant number 22YJA630031]; Sichuan Information Management and Service Research Center Project [grant number SCXX2022YB01].