Linking leadership to employee ingenuity

A new study published in the International Journal of Work Innovation has revealed interesting insights into creativity among employees of Pakistan's private real estate sector. The research could have important implications for both theory and practice in work innovations in this sector and beyond. The team offers several recommendations for the next steps to be taken in this area of research and suggests similar studies might be fruitful in other regions and in sectors such as the information technology sector as well as in education.

Muhammad Bilal Kayani, Komal Shafique, and Maryam Ali of the National University of Modern Languages in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, have carried out a mediation and moderation analysis with a view to understanding the relationship between creativity and leadership in an import sector within the commercial and business worlds—real estate.

The team looked at the effects of two distinct styles of leadership—inclusive and transformational—and how these influence or employee creativity. They surveyed some 250 employees in the real estate sector and had a response rate of 74%. The results showed that while inclusive leadership may well see greater employee confidence in terms of an individual's perception of their own abilities, it ultimately had no impact on that individual's creativity. The effect of transformational leadership, which generally brings in new ideas to a workplace, however, was different, having a positive effect on employee creativity.

The team also revealed two other characteristics of employees in this sector in that they could see that psychological empowerment had a significant role to play, but an organizational learning culture had negligible effect.