A Two-Pronged Approach? Combined Leadership Styles and Innovative Behavior

ABSTRACT

This article examines the relationship between transformational, transactional, and empowering leadership and the innovative behavior of public sector employees. Instead of investigating their association individually, this article focuses on the interaction between different types of leadership. The analysis is based on a survey from one of Denmark’s largest hospitals (n = 1,647). The main result is that empowering leadership, which focuses on employee capacity, moderates the association between transformational leadership, which is directed at motivation, and innovative behavior. The findings emphasize the importance of not only focusing on a single leadership style but also understanding how they work in combination.

KEYWORDS:

• Innovative behavior
• transformational leadership
• transactional leadership
• empowering leadership
• hospitals

Funding

We thank the Velux Foundation for funding this research (grant number: VELUX3051).

Notes

¹ This study relies on the widely popular conceptualization of transformational leadership according to Bass (1985) and Judge & Bono (2000) where transformational leadership is associated with inspiring followers. It needs to be stated, however, that transformational leadership can be associated with both authoritarian leadership as well as democratic leadership. While the former leads to dependence of followers on the leader, the latter relates to followers’ empowerment (Kark, Shamir, & Chen, 2003).

² It is important to notice that even so the term empowerment has been only popularized recently, the idea behind it is not new. In psychology and management studies, researchers have persistently advocated for empowerment in various forms, for example,: Theory Y, Likert’s four system styles and job enrichment theory, to name only a few (Wall, Cordery, & Clegg, 2002). Common to these approaches is that empowerment is understood as a path to enhance employee’s work and thus organizational performance. Furthermore, it needs to be stated that the concept of empowerment, in some versions, includes elements of transformational leadership. It is hence not surprising that one often finds positive correlations between these leadership styles (Hartog et al., 1997; Judge & Piccolo, 2004; Wofford et al., 1998), which emphasizes the importance of detangling their effects (for further considerations please see the methods section of this article).

³ MLQ Form 5X (copyright 1995 by Bernard Bass and Bruce Avolio) is used with the permission of Mind Garden, 1690 Woodside Road, Suite, 202, Redwood City, CA 94601. All rights reserved.