رهبری واقعی برای ترویج سرمایه روانشناختی کارکنان و خلاقیت

Two hundred and one employees report their psychological capital, as well as their supervisors' authentic leadership. Supervisors describe the employees' creativity. The main findings show that authentic leadership predicts employees' creativity, both directly and through the mediating role of employees' psychological capital. The study empirically validates theoretical arguments that suggest integrating authentic leadership and psychological capital in research, and indicates that both may foster employees' creativity, a crucial resource for helping organizations to face competitive challenges, take advantage of business opportunities, and improve organizational effectiveness.

Authentic leadership (AL) is “as a pattern of leader behavior that draws upon and promotes both positive psychological capacities and a positive ethical climate, to foster greater self-awareness, an internalized moral perspective, balanced processing of information, and relational transparency on the part of leaders working with followers, fostering positive self-development” (Walumbwa, Avolio, Gardner, Wernsing, & Peterson, 2008: 94). In recent years, the topic is a target of great interest both among scholars (e.g., Avolio and Gardner, 2005 and Walumbwa et al., 2008) and practitioners (e.g., George, 2003). Both argue that AL promotes positive employees' attitudes and behaviors and contributes to organizational performance. More empirical research is necessary for continuing to test this premise. This paper merges the AL, psychological capital (PsyCap; Luthans, Youssef, & Avolio, 2007), and creativity literatures, and shows how AL predicts employees' creativity both directly and through the mediating role of PsyCap (Fig. 1). PsyCap is an individual's positive psychological state of development characterized by: “(1) having confidence (self-efficacy) to take on and put in the necessary effort to succeed at challenging tasks; (2) making a positive attribution (optimism) about succeeding now and in the future; (3) persevering toward goals and, when necessary, redirecting paths to goals (hope) in order to succeed; and (4) when beset by problems and adversity, sustaining and bouncing back and even beyond (resilience) to attain success” (Luthans, Youssef, & Avolio, 2007: 3). The study answers calls to integrate AL and PsyCap literatures (Gardner et al., 2005 and Yammarino et al., 2008) and helps to understand the process through which AL contributes to employees' creativity.Studying the antecedents of employees' creativity is important because, to survive and prosper, organizations need to take full advantage of their employees' creative potential, so that innovation, change, learning, performance, and competitiveness can be sustained. Creativity in the workplace represents the production of novel and useful ideas or solutions concerning products, services, processes, and procedures (Amabile, 1988, Amabile, 1997 and Oldham and Cummings, 1997). The goal of creative performance is to solve problems, to roll out new products and services, to take advantage of business opportunities, and to improve organizational effectiveness. Individual creativity is a function of individual and social/contextual factors (Egan, 2005, Oldham and Cummings, 1997 and Shalley and Gilson, 2004). One of the most relevant contextual factors is leadership. Several researchers focus on identifying the role of specific leadership behaviors and leaders' characteristics in supporting, suppressing, facilitating, or inhibiting creativity (e.g., Hirst et al., 2009, Mumford et al., 2002, Oldham and Cummings, 1997 and Rego et al., 2007; Reiter-Palmon and Illies, 2004; Shalley and Gilson, 2004, Shin and Zhou, 2003 and Tierney et al., 1999; Zhou, 2003; Zhang & Bartol, 2010; Zhou & George, 2003; Wang and Cheng, 2010). These behaviors include transformational leadership, emotional intelligence, close monitoring, developmental feedback, supportive supervision, controlling supervision, benevolent leadership, leader encouragement of creativity, leader inspirational motivation, and empowering leadership. Studies also focus on employees' characteristics and attitudes that make them more creative. For example, Amabile (1983) suggests domain-relevant skills (knowledge and expertise), creativity-relevant processes (including cognitive styles, cognitive strategies, and personality variables), and task motivation (attitudes and motivation, such as intrinsic motivation) as predictors of creativity. Woodman, Sawyer, and Griffin (1993) model includes personality variables, cognitive factors, intrinsic motivation, and knowledge. Ford (1996) includes sense making, motivation, knowledge and ability. According to Egan (2005), the studies identify a consistent number of individual factors associated with individual creativity, including esthetic sensitivity, attraction to complexity, broad interests, intuition, and tolerance of ambiguity. This paper adds to such lines of research, answering to a call of Shalley and Gilson (2004) for more research focusing on the interaction between personal characteristics and work context. The study focuses on how AL (a contextual factor) predicts employees' creativity, both directly and through the mediating role of employees' PsyCap (a personal strength). The paper hypothesizes that AL promotes employees' creativity because authentic leaders encourage employees' PsyCap (Avolio et al., 2004 and Yammarino et al., 2008), with employees with higher PsyCap being more creative (Avolio et al., 2004, Bandura, 1997 and Rego et al., 2009). The study also posits direct relationships between AL and creativity because authentic leaders may promote employees' creativity through mechanisms other than PsyCap. For example, AL may improve the quality of leader–member exchange, thus increasing employees' trust and the sense of freedom to propose unconventional ideas, and introduce conflicting opinions without fear (Avolio and Gardner, 2005, Avolio et al., 2004, Brower et al., 2000, Ilies et al., 2005, Liden et al., 1997, Prati et al., 2003 and Scott and Bruce, 1994). Employees may also feel psychologically safer, thus taking initiative for facing problems and opportunities in creative ways (Edmondson, 1999 and Prati et al., 2003). The remainder of the paper structures as follows. The second section discusses arguments leading to the hypotheses. The third and fourth sections present the method and results, respectively. The final section discusses the main findings, the limitations of the research, and some avenues for future research. The study seeks to contribute to enriching a research stream that is in an early stage of development and to a literature that is still short on empirical studies (Walumbwa et al., 2008 and Yammarino et al., 2008). Considering that most studies about leadership come from the USA (House & Aditya, 1997), the paper also responds to a call for research in more culturally diverse samples (Gelfand et al., 2007 and Walumbwa et al., 2008).

Creativity is the first step in innovation, and innovation is crucial for long-term organizational success (Amabile, 1997). Thus, organizations need to take advantage of and facilitate the creativity of their employees. This study may help organizations and researchers to identify ways to address these needs. The findings suggest that AL is an important predictor of employees' creativity and help to understand the processes through which the relationship operates. Authentic leaders promote employees' creativity because employees develop higher PsyCap, thus being more creative. The findings also show direct relationships between AL and employees' creativity, suggesting that other variables/mechanisms than PsyCap operate in the process that makes the employees led by authentic leaders more creative. Future studies may explore the influence of variables such as identification with the supervisor, psychological empowerment, work engagement, trust, feelings of meaningful work, intrinsic motivation, positive emotions, leader–member exchange, and followers' authenticity. For example, do authentic leaders promote employees' creativity because the employees feel empowered, engaged, happier, intrinsically motivated, and develop greater commitment toward their leaders? The predictive value of AL for employees' PsyCap is also important because PsyCap relates with variables such as job satisfaction, organizational commitment, happiness at work, and in-role and extra-role performance (Avey et al., 2008, Luthans, Avolio, Avey and Norman, 2007, Luthans, Norman, Avolio and Avey, 2008 and Youssef and Luthans, 2007). Therefore, the study indirectly corroborates theoretical and empirical evidence showing that authentic leaders may be able to foster employee flourishing and performance (Gardner et al., 2005 and Walumbwa et al., 2008). This is a contribution to a field where empirical studies remain scarce (Walumbwa et al., 2008 and Yammarino et al., 2008), mainly regarding the mediating variables that explain the impact of AL in outcomes with organizational relevance.