The impact of ethical and participative leadership on innovative work behaviour in tech firms : The role of self-efficacy and creative process engagement

Background: Nowadays, companies from the technological sector confront extreme competition and itis always a challenge for leadership teams to increase competitiveness. This study aims to investigateinnovation advancement within tech companies in an international context from the leadership andmanagement incentives point of view. Leadership plays a vital role in giving direction to the path anorganization should follow. It is of significant interest to examine how leadership can drive anorganization to innovative thinking. Different approaches and leadership styles can be adopted andpracticed by leaders to produce different outcomes on employees’ creative culture. Additionally,individual characteristics of the employees such as self-efficacy and creativity may allow the innovativebehaviours to strive and create a workplace culture that is inducing innovative output. Innovative workbehaviour is becoming more popular or even mandatory within several firms in the technological sectorin contrast to previous decades. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to explore how ethical leadership and participative leadershipstyle can affect innovative work behaviour and to examine if the creative process engagement and selfefficacylead to enhanced innovative work behaviour. Methodology: For this thesis a quantitative approach for data collection, as well as data analysis is used.This study is based on a SEM model which contains close-ended questions that were answered througha self-administrated questionnaire. The survey was answered by employees working at companies fromthe field of technology, covering different positions. A total of 177 respondents answered thequestionnaire, and the results were analysed both in quantitative and qualitative ways. IBM SPSSsoftware was used for the statistical analysis, and AMOS 26 for the Structural Equation Modeling tests. Results: The results of the statistical analysis performed unveiled that the aspects of ethical andparticipative leadership can positively affect creativity and innovation and that self-efficacy canpositively relate to creative process engagement.Conclusion: This study contributes in showing that two positive ways of management, ethical andparticipative can be introduced by leaders that are interested in increasing creativeness and innovationat work; it also shows that for the sample tested, ethical and participative leadership does not necessarilyhas a major effect on employee’s self-efficacy. Delimitations: The geographical locations, the time and sample size, the choice of participatingorganizations, and the framework designed for the evaluation of the theoretical problem are consideredas limitations for this study. This research is mainly limited to professionals working in the technologicalsector and the study is restricted in time since the participants had to answer in a certain time frame. Toconclude, the sample size of the survey even though is satisfactory for its intended use, could be higher.Presentation was conducted via video link and were chaired by Anders Wrenne.Anders Wrenne e-mail: anders.wrenne@bth.se