Conceptions of Kosovar employees on transformational/creative leadership

Creative leadership is a rather novel topic, despite the fact that, leadership and creativity are widely researched and have gained considerable attention these last decades. Leadership and creativity are both complex and much needed processes in everyday work. Specifically, transformational leadership and creativity have traits and attributes that correlate and predict each other. Providing new ties and linkages, as well as connecting already existing attributes, traits and facets, a more complex form of understanding these two processes is proposed, thus creating options to novel and innovative knowledge. An exploratory design with mixed methods was used to answer the questions posed. The research design started with focus group discussions, in order to deeply understand the conceptions of Kosovar engineers about creative leadership, followed by the selection of instruments and quantitative data collection. The doctoral research was conducted, as follows: Four focus groups discussions, with four participants each, were conducted and followed by quantitative part, the main data collection with 182 Kosovar engineers, from whom 103 employees were from private companies and the remaining 79 were from public companies. All of the participants were engineers. Through interpretation of findings, thesis illustrates linkages between leadership and creativity. After establishing and reconfirming the relationship between these two processes, thesis provides deeper understanding of specific characteristics of personality – as one of the key dimensions of creativity and leadership, specifically transformational leadership. Furthermore, comparative analysis between other factors, such as the status of the company (public vs. private) and gender are analyzed and presented in order to have a more complete understanding of the interactions between analyzed variables. This doctoral thesis, unfolds chapter by chapter and processes described are interlined in delivering the end result