What Is the Link Between Innovation and Transformational Leadership - Assignment Example

Leadership Name Institution Lecturer Course Date What Is the Link Between Innovation and Transformational Leadership? In recent days, organisations are experiencing an increasing need in innovation to be able to keep up with the increasing competition resulting from the advancement in technology and knowledge in every sector around the globe. Leadership is crucial in these economic changing times and there is need for organisations to have the right type of leaders to be able to lead effectively the organisation to the right direction of innovation (Gerybadze et al., 2010). One such leadership style is the transformational leadership. Transformational leadership can be described as leadership that causes changes in the social and individual systems to enhancing morale, performance and motivation through several mechanisms. Transformational leaders usually use mechanisms such as being a role model who inspires followers, connecting followers’ identity to that of the organisation and its mission, trying to understand their followers’ weaknesses and strengths and motivating followers to own up their responsibilities (Given, 2008). Transformational leadership and innovation are key factors in influencing the performance of the organisation. The purpose of this paper is to explore if there is any link between transformational leadership and innovation. A study in Taiwan by Jung, Chow and Wu (2003), indicated that there is a strong positive relationship between organisational innovation and transformational leadership. Organisational innovation is a product of creative behaviours that are enhanced by several factors that include the intellectual capacity of employees, personal attributes, a conducive working environment that enhances creativity, supervision that is supportive and experience. Of all these factors of enhancing innovation, the style of leadership used within the organisation has been seen to be the most crucial and important factor. Leaders have the ability to affect both indirectly or directly the creativity of their followers. For example, leaders in an organisation can indirectly influence the creativity of their followers by developing a working environment where the employees can have the freedom of trying out different approaches towards solving certain issues without having to worry that they will be punished due to negative results (Shalley, Hitt & Zhou, 2015). In addition, leaders can affect the creativity of employees directly by being role models and motivating them to take up challenges and broadens their thinking capacity hence enhancing creativity leading to innovation (Blush, 2012). There is rapidly change in the business environment that is characterised by increased technological advances, universal economic environment, globalisation and shorter product life cycle that has placed a lot of pressure on organisations requiring them to adopt more creativity and high levels of innovations. Most organisations are adopting the transformational leadership style which is crucial in motivating employees beyond any expectations and helps free the creativity that they might be having within them (Karim & Morshedi, 2015). This style of leadership helps in transforming the self-concepts and values of an employee towards high levels of aspirations (Jung, Chow & Wu, 2003). Most employees perceive transformational leadership to having a significant effect on enhancing creativity since it focuses on factors such as empowerment, positive working relationships, organisational learning, intrinsic motivation and giving support to innovation (Hsiao & Chang, 2011). This analysis creates the picture of the strong link existing between transformational leadership and innovation that has seen most organisations opting for transformational leaders to enhance creativity and increase innovation (Alrifi, 2012). To understand the link between creativity, innovation and transformational leadership, it is important to understand how the three concepts interrelate with each other. Innovation can be describes as the implementation of ideas to develop effective process within an organisation for purposes such as cost saving, application of new technology in products and service production, communication improvement and the development of new structures for the organisation that would enhance performance and productivity (Samad, 2012). Creativity on the other hand can be described as the creation of novel as well as creative ideas. This makes creativity an individual level of implementing ideas while innovation is the collective implementation of ideas within an organisation (Crawford, 2004). Several researches have been done on the link between the creativity, innovation and transformational leadership. One dominant fact from these studies is that intrinsic motivation and intellectual stimulation are crucial factor in enhancing creativity in an individual. Intellectual stimulation, which is one of the dimensions of transformational leadership, has been seen to promote creativity and innovation in most organisations by stimulating employees to use their creative thinking skills (Gumusluoglu & Ilsev, 2009). For example, a transformational leader facing issues in his department concerning the best strategy to save the time taken to finish some work will use specialisation so that every employee is assigned a job they love doing. This ensures that employees enjoy taking on their responsibility and this motivates them to work fast and save on time allowing them to be more creative and innovative in their field of interest (Kakouris, 2010). Another dimension that shows the link between transformational leadership and innovation as indicated by Alrifi (2012) is inspirational motivation. This dimension involves leaders’ ability to communicate to his followers’ high expectation using concepts that focuses the followers’ efforts toward achieving self and organisational objectives. This transformational leadership dimension helps to stimulate intellectual creativity that promotes rationality and creativity in finding solution to complex issues (Zhao, Pablos & Tennyson, 2014). For example, when a leader uses concepts such as rewards for the best performing employee who works towards achieving the vision and goals of the organisation, this inspires followers to thinks and come up with creative ways, appropriate in achieving the set goals (Razavi & Attarnezhad, 2013). Transformational leaders are also keen on the work environment their followers are working in. Environments that encourage intellectual creativity and provide employees’ freedom to be creative also enhance innovation. Environment with the right working equipment and freedom to express ones creativity incorporated with the right attitude from leaders is a great place to generate new ideas and promote innovation (Gumusluoglu & Ilsev, 2009). For example, a leader will provide a working environment with the latest information technology equipment, and a less formal working space for his employees to ensure that everyone is able to interact and express their ideas, without being restricted to express their creativity. Transformational leadership is also linked to innovation through its idealised influence dimension. Idealised influence involves leaders who can be describes as charismatic role models. Often these types of leaders can be trusted and are highly respected by their followers and colleagues (Rehman et al, 2014). They are responsible and usually accountable of any action they take. They are creative, encourage teamwork and are not ready to help and listen to their followers. Being such a transformative leader, gives followers someone to admire and look up to. This motivates most of them to work as smart and creatively as their leader whether individually or collectively enhancing innovation (Hall et al., 2002). An example is a leader who is given the responsibility of overseeing a certain project. He ensures that he works with his team members, takes accountability of any mismanagement, listens to his team members ideas and worries and encourages them to express their views on certain decisions, which encourages the team members to be more creative and even come up with innovative ideas for the projects (Hyypia & Parjanen, 2013). Individualised consideration is another transformational leadership dimension that links it to innovation. This dimension describes leaders who are advisors and couches to their followers. In most cases leaders tend to be more experienced that their followers. This makes them at a better position to advice and couch their followers on the appropriate ways of approaching things. This encourages followers to reach their maximum potentials foe their self-development and for the development of the organisations, which in turn leads to innovations (Jung, Chow & Wu, 2003). For example, a leader who has been in the car marketing industry will couch and advise his subordinates on the best marketing strategies that would maximise on the sales of the organisation. This encourages them to also learn more and use their creativity to come up with new ideas that would enhance innovation in the marketing department. Transformational leadership is more adaptive and flexible and it is easy to change with the organisational changes that may occur within the organisation. This makes it easy for the organisation to encourage innovation and creativity of their employees since it is easy to transit from old methods of doing things to new ones. The relationship between leaders and employees is also crucial when it comes to developing new ideas for innovation. The quality of leader-member-exchange (LMX) is one concept that can be used to predict innovation prosperity. Transformational leadership provides high quality LMX, which gives employees confidence to engage in more challenging task by providing more rewards and resources to the best performing individuals and hence enhancing innovation (Chell & Karats-Ozkan, 2014). Conclusion In conclusion, there are several reasons analysed in this paper that support the fact that there is a strong link between transformational leadership and innovation. One reason is the fact that transformational leaders will always go beyond the contractual agreement stated for desirable performance through active engagement of their subordinates’ personal values. They will develop explanations that are ideological that relate their subordinates’ identity to that of the organisation. This helps increase and improve the intrinsic motivation of the subordinates, which promotes innovation. The second reason is the fact that transformational leaders will always give intellectual stimulation that allows followers to enhance their creative thinking skills and adopt exploratory as well as a generative thinking processes. This helps the followers to move out of their comfort zone and develop new ideas that allow them to tackle old issues using new dimensions. Thirdly, transformative leaders have the ability to empower their followers by allowing them to participate in the decision making process, couching them and encourages them to corporate in teams which allows them to learn from shared ideas and experiences. Transformational leadership enhances confidence, teamwork, integrity, morals, better working environments and creativity through motivation, inspiration, idealised influence and intellectual stimulation that ends up promote innovation. References Alrifi, S. (2012). The Effects of Transformational Leadership on Followers’ Creativity and Organisational Innovation in Public Sector. London: Brunel Business School, Brunel University. Blush, P. M. (2012). Transforming Your STEM Career through Leadership and Innovation: Inspiration and Strategies for Women. Academic Press. Chell, E. & Karatas-Ozkan, M. (2014). Handbook of Research on Small Business and Entrepreneurship. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing Limited. Crawford, C. B. (2004). Transformational Leadership, Innovation and Knowledge Management: Empirical Findings and Emergent Conclusion. Hays: Fort Hays State University. Gerybadze, A., Hommel, U., Reiners, H. W. & Thomaschew, D. (2010). Innovation and International Corporate Growth. New York: Springer. Given, R. (2008). Transformational Leadership: The Impact and Personal Outcomes. Emerging Leadership Journeys, 1(1), 4-24. Gumusluoglu, L. & Ilsev, A. (2009). Transformational Leadership, Creativity and Organizational Innovation. Journal of Business Research, 62, 461-473. Hall, J., Johnson, S., Wysocki, A. & Kepner, K. (2002). Transformational leadership: The Transformational of Managers and Associate. Gainesville: University of Florida. Hyypia, M. & Parjanen, S. (2013). Boosting Creativity with Transformational Leadership in Fuzzy Front-end Innovation Processes. Interdisciplinary Journal of Information, Knowledge and Management, 8, 21-41. Hsiao, H and Chang, J.(2011). The role of organizational learning in transformational leadership and organizational innovation. Asia Pacific Education Review, 12 (4), 621-631. Jung, D.I., Chow, C. & Wu, A. (2003). The Role of Transformational Leadership in Enhancing Organizational Innovation: Hypothesis and Some Preliminary Findings. The Leadership Quarterly, 14, 525-544. Kakouris, A. (2010). Proceedings of the 5thEuropeanConference on Innovation and Entrepreneurship. U.K.: Academic Publishing Limited. Karim, F. & Morshedi, Z. (2015). The Relationship between Transformational Leadership with Organisational Innovation. Int J Educ Psychol Res, 1(3), 226-233. Rehman, A., Ghaffar, H., Hussain, Z., Atta, M., Ahmed, M. & Rauf, M. (2014). Transformational Leadership and Organisational Innovation: The Role of Perceived Job Self-Efficacy. Applied Science and Business Economics, 1(1), 56-62. Razavi, S.H. & Attarnezhad, O. (2013). Management of Organizational Innovation. International Journal of Business and Social Sciences, 4(1), 226-232. Samad, S. (2012). The Influence of Innovation and Transformational Leadership on Organizational Performance. Procedia-Social and Behaviour Science, 57, 486-493. Shalley, C.E. Hitt, M. A. & Zhou, J. (2015). The Oxford Handbook of Creativity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship. New York: Oxford University Press. Zhao, J., Pablos, P. &Tennyson, R. (2014). Organizational Innovation and IT Governance in Emerging Economics. Hershey: Business and Economics. Read More