How leadership matters in organizational innovation: a perspective of openness
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to answer the following two questions: What are the influences of the top managers’ different leadership styles on organizational innovation? What is the mechanism by which the different leaderships exert different effects on organizational innovation?
Design/methodology/approach
To test the hypothesized model, a data set based on 133 MBA part-time students from Tsinghua University and Zhejiang University in China was built, after interviewing several top managers as a pilot study. With the help of SPSS macro, hierarchical regression and bootstrapping analysis, the paper analyzes the effects of two leadership styles on innovation performance, through the mediation mechanism of openness involving open breadth and open depth.
Findings
The results indicate that transformational leadership enhances, while transactional leadership reduces, the organizational innovation performance. The openness breadth and openness depth not only mediate the beneficial effect of transformational leadership on innovation, but also mediate the deleterious effect of transactional leadership on innovation.
Originality/value
This study empirically explores the different functions of transformational leadership and transactional leadership for leading organizational innovation performance. Furthermore, a new form of organization is an open design or strategy that allows more external knowledge and resources to be absorbed, which is claimed as a new paradigm for organization innovation. This study integrates the concepts of breadth of openness and depth of openness on the basis of open innovation literature, as an intermediate mechanism to explain the different effects of the two forms of top managers’ leadership.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by the Independent Science Foundation of China’s Ministry of Education (Grant No. 2014z04085), the National Key Technology Support Program of China’s Ministry of Science and Technology (Grant No. 2015BAK26B01), the National Social Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 15AZD005) and the National Natural Science Youth Foundation of China (Grant No. 71704090). The authors would like to thank the editors of this journal, editors of this special issue and two anonymous reviewers, who provided the authors great and helpful comments, sincerely.
Citation
Jia, X., Chen, J., Mei, L. and Wu, Q. (2018), "How leadership matters in organizational innovation: a perspective of openness", Management Decision, Vol. 56 No. 1, pp. 6-25. https://doi.org/10.1108/MD-04-2017-0415
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2018, Emerald Publishing Limited