An Empirical Study on How Empowering Leadership Affects the Team Creativity

Under the circumstances of open innovation, exploratory and exploitative learning are thought to be effective ways to improve team performance especially for team creativity. Team leaders on one hand have much more rights and resources to influence the process of team learning. On the other hand, they are prone to delegate their powers to encourage team members to get involved in team work thoroughly. By which way can the empowering leadership affect the team creativity? To clarify this point, the paper employs 266 questionnaires from 51 project teams to explore the influence path between empowering leadership and team creativity by taking exploratory and exploitative learning as the mediators. Empirical results show that exploratory learning including experiment and external communication and exploitative learning including team reflection and internal communication play the mediating roles between situational and psychological empowerment and team creativity. Comparing with two types of empowerment, the role of psychological empowerment is more important than situational empowerment for exploratory learning, whereas for exploitative learning situational empowerment is more important than psychological empowerment.