Integrating dependency on the leader and empowerment into the transformational leadership-creative performance relationship

Previous literature highlights employees’ creativity as an important means to foster innovation and competitive advantage in companies. Transformational leadership is a leadership approach aiming at stimulating and encouraging the creative performance of employees. However, contradictory empirical findings indicate that the relationship between transformational leadership and creativity may be more complex than a simple direct link. Drawing from existing literature, we propose that dependency on the leader is a partial mediator of this relationship, impeding employees’ creativity. Synthesizing theories of leadership and creativity, we propose that empowerment as a moderator is able to reduce the dependency on the leader caused by transformational leadership as well as to contribute to turning possible negative outcomes of transformational leadership on creative performance into positive. Findings of a PLS analysis of 271 employees support the predicted mediating and moderating effects. Post-hoc analysis reveals a curvilinear moderating effect and provides additional insights on the varying effects of the subdimensions of empowerment.