Transformational Leadership and Employees’ Creativity: A Multi-Mediation Model

Abstract

This research aims to examine the relationship between transformational leadership and employees’ creativity through mediating role of trust and job autonomy. The study employed cross sectional survey method for the collection of data from 187 employees working in construction and banking sectors of Pakistan. The findings reveal that transformational leadership fosters employees’ creativity through trust and job autonomy. Both trust and job autonomy have statistically significant mediating effect. However, trust being the mediator, plays a more significant role in boosting up the transformational leadership and employees’ creativity relationship as compared to job autonomy. This research helps to know how transformational leadership enhances employees’ creativity by enlightening the mediating role of trust and job autonomy. Further, the findings of this research also help the managers to understand and create such environment which enhances employees’ creativity by focusing on the factors identified in this study. This research contributes to advance the literature on the mediating role of trust and job autonomy in describing the relationship of transformational leader and employee’s creativity and highlighting that trust plays a more important role to enhance creativity in contrast to job autonomy. Further, this is the first attempt to enhance the employee creativity through transformational leadership style and the mediating role of both trust and job autonomy in Pakistan.