Transformational leadership is critical for growth of organization as it disseminates motivational and intellectual skills among colleagues through knowledge sharing and idea generation. It provides employees with favourable environment in which they freely put forward their suggestions, regardless of their diversity (Givens, 2008). The concept of transformational leadership leverages the trends of innovation and creativity, motivation, and reward practices, which are advantageous for the growth of individual employees, teams, and the entire organization.
General Industrial Trends Overview
Creativity and Innovation
Transformational leaders are currently seeking and investing on a highly skilled, innovative, and creative workforce to help them turnaround organisations. The aspects of creativity and innovation entail identification, modifying an existing product, developing a new item or generating a new idea to provide a solution to an existing challenge (Moynihan, Pandey & Wright, 2012). Organisations have come to realise the great importance of innovativeness as they find it difficult to successfully compete in the constantly shifting business environment with several challenges that require effective solutions. Moreover, technological advancement is growing at a fast pace that puts pressure on firms to continuously innovate their products, processes, and ideas.
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Reward System
Transformative leaders put in place proper reward systems for their followers. Both monetary and non-monetary reward practices are effective in boosting employees’ morale and their performance (Lewis, Boston & Peterson, 2017). A leader can put certain targets for his/her subjects to attain and this should go alongside specific rewards for the individuals who make it to the final goal. For example, promoting an employee to be a team leader upon excelling in an assigned task is a non-monetary reward.
Motivation
Followers feel encouraged to pursue a common goal when they are motivated. Human resource professionals have acknowledged the significant impact of motivation on their employees (Liu & Li, 2018). Motivation can come from within (intrinsic influencers) or external environment (extrinsic influencers). For example, a conducive working environment is a motivator that can encourage employees to remain committed to the organisation as they work to realise the best results in their jobs.
Concept of Transformational Leadership
Transformational leaders are often identified with the traits of inspirational and intellectual capacities. The abilities enable one to effectively communicate with high level of confidence, as the individual assumes responsibility for his/her subordinates, facilitate their professional growth, promote their creativity or innovation, encourages higher standards of work values through shared missions, and inculcating a sense of direction and purpose into employees’ roles (Dimaculangan & Aguiling, 2012). Such leaders remain committed to goal and desire to attain the best productivity of their organisations through motivation as well as encouraging those they lead to realise the best expectations and enhancing knowledge transfer and culture of innovation. Creativity and innovation among individual employees and teams constitute modern trends that are crucial for productivity as well as the overall performance of organisations.
Chosen Industry Trend
The analysis is based on the trend of creativity and innovation.
Research Question
What is the influence of transformational leadership on employee innovation?
Transformational Leadership and Trend of Innovation
Current organisational challenges have resulted in the development of leadership style that is centred on change, which is explored under the domains of risk-taking, implementing action, creativity, and visionary qualities. Chen (2018) coined the componential creativity theory that explains the situation in which extrinsic and intrinsic motivation drives a person's creativity. One's ability to innovate can be positively or adversely influenced by environmental factors since the work environment mediates employees' innovativeness. Therefore, it is imperative to explore the impact of supportive team leaders in enhancing creativity among employees.
Individuals who follow transformational leaders tend to be motivated beyond the confines of contractual minimum role demands described in their job descriptions (JDs), leading to higher contextual performance such as promoting the brand image of the organisation, voluntarily assisting their co-workers in need, and organisational citizenship (Dinh et al ., 2014). Innovative behaviour among employees is highly linked to different attributes, with transformational leadership taking the centre stage. Transformative leaders yearn for exemplary performance above normal expectations. They inspire their subordinates in the intellectual sense to rise above the status quo, specifically by promoting room for divergent thinking and incentivising them to assume certain elements of risk. The aspect or risk-taking is paramount for productivity and overall performance because it entails coming up with creative ideas and implementing innovative solutions that can help in transforming the organisation.
Followers tend to enjoy working in environments where divergent opinions are accepted. Creativity is enhanced by incorporating a variety of suggestions from individuals without subjecting them to negative criticism that may make them feel embarrassed and discouraged from taking part in constructive debates to come up with new products, ideas, and business solutions. For example, these attributes are crucial in an intellectually highly demanding manufacturing industry in which critical decisions are assumed in the entire day. Employees continually brainstorm and suggested new ideas to efficiently produce highly competitive products that attract significant volumes of sales (Pretorius, Steyn, & Bond-Barnard, 2018). Innovative approaches envisioned in creativity and efficiency are important in developing quality products with minimal costs and resources. As a result, manufacturers can leverage quality attributes and low-cost production, which assist them to sell at a profit. The aspect of competitiveness is also key because it enables the producer to gain a competitive advantage among its competitors. Firms capitalise on creativity and innovation to differentiate their products and services; as a result, their business rivals find it difficult to imitate their products.
Transformative leaders often innovate new solutions to challenges that their organisations are facing by engaging in continuous research and development. The breakthrough is facilitated by engaging in continuous improvement approaches to come up with new techniques (Xu, 2017). Companies operating in the 21 st century face challenges of high competition, unsatisfied consumer demand, and dynamic business environment that needs effective strategies to effectively deal with emerging problems, thus the justification for transformative leadership to enhance strong innovation and creativity.
The concept of transformational leadership has also come in handy in the development of team innovativeness. Diverse creative output in most organisations is achieved when two or more employees work closely together while guided by the positive spirit of teamwork. A review of the literature on team creativity considers both team and contextual elements that influence collective creativity among diverse team members or groups (Tuuk, 2012). For example, groups can engage in teleworking and share their results without necessarily being present in the same location. The practice is beneficial, especially in situations where the resource is scarce to accommodate everyone. Work stations that are squeezed can utilise teleworking to save of renting bigger spaces which add to the cost of doing businesses. Transformative leaders can encourage their followers to incorporate technological innovation of teleconferencing, video-conferencing, and skype to share and engage with other workers as they work on assigned projects.
Contextual influences such as climate factors affect the quality and frequency of social interaction among team members and the overall group creativity. At the contextual level, influencers of relationships comprise the relationship with colleagues and team leaders, job complexity, rewards, work settings, evaluations, and deadlines ( Perreault, Cohen & Blanchard, 2015) . As transformational leadership attributes build trust, motivational inspiration, and intellectual stimulant into group members, the feeling of threat disappears while teams gain higher trust in the work environment (Li et al ., 2019). Therefore, employees are inspired to voluntarily share their knowledge with colleagues, leading to better performance for every team member.
A lack of effective leadership is linked to negative attributes of the group formation and maintenance process, which eventually lower psychological safety as well as minimal trust among colleagues in the workplace. The resulting bad climate is a detriment to healthy interaction among members of a team. The claim has been supported by Wang and Wang (2012) meta-analysis which established a strong positive link of transformational leadership with team performance. The authors observed that the contingency reward system greatly influence an individual's task performance (Wang & Wang, 2012). Further, the finding conforms to the transformational leadership theory, grounded on the assertion that a creative leader’s role rises beyond the responsibility of a supporter or facilitator of other individuals’ work.
Transformational leaders succinctly express a vision as well as intellectually inspire their subjects to attain the stated vision by demonstrating their confidence among their team members while encouraging cooperation and coordination to promote team cohesion. They act as role models by motivating their subjects, encouraging the development of creative ideas, provision of resources, and driving organisation vision. Such leaders also look into the possible implication of adopting new approaches (Chen et al. , 2018) . Leaders who are highly transformative focus on the benefits of team identity, diversity, potency, and efficacy, which motivate members to cherish greater team commitment, coordination, and performance.
Transformational leaders also morally care for their subjects, sensitise, and facilitate care for their colleagues, hence the enhanced team synergy further promotes group performance (David, 2014). They put dual impacts on team performance, for instance, intellectual stimulation at an individual is actualised through individualised consideration which encourages identification between a person and the leader. At the team level, the effect is evident in the leader's idealised impact and motivation to strengthen the link with the workgroups. A review of empirical evidence shows an inconsistent and limited impact of transformational leadership on harming a subject's innovative behavior. However, few areas of inconsistency demand for the establishment of moderator elements upon which the association between innovation and leadership are contingent.
Conclusion
Growing trends of creativity and innovation are imperative for the success of organisations, specifically in situations of new product development, idea generation, making effective decisions, and problem-solving. The trend applied in this analysis is based on the manufacturing industry. Transformational leadership is beneficial to the innovativeness of employees, productivity, and overall performance of organisations. Empirical evidence reaffirms the statement that transformational leaders are important for workers and teams, irrespective of the situation. Visionary leadership drives a sense of purpose and direction, which scale up creativity and innovation among individual employees and team members.
References
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