Does Meaningful Work Explains the Relationship Between Transformational Leadership and Innovative Work Behaviour?

Abstract

Executive SummaryTransformational leaders motivate their followers to relook their job by elevating the status of the job from being boring, repetitive and menial into something more meaningful and significant. This ascendance of employee’s job as something important and its contribution to overall organizational vision is what prompts them to engage in innovative work behaviour. Therefore, it would be interesting to test the indirect effect of transformational leadership on followers’ innovative work behaviour as mediated through followers’ perception of meaningful work.The current study is set to serve two purposes. First, to clear the confusion regarding the findings related to transformational leadership’s influence on employee’s innovative work behaviour. Second, to investigate the mediating role of meaningful work in explaining the relationship between transformational leadership and innovative work behaviour. Data was collected from two samples, Sample I (349 executives) and Sample II (539 executives), working in two different manufacturing organizations in Eastern India.The results of both the samples confirm that transformational leadership significantly influences employee’s innovative work behaviour. Also, the study (both Samples I and II) finds meaningful work to partially mediate the relationship between transformational leadership and employees’ innovation. In order to lend further credibility to our mediation finding, we carried out Sobel test and bootstrapping technique to strengthen our assertion.This study replicates previous empirical investigations by exploring the relationship between transformational leadership and employee’s innovative behaviour at work in Indian manufacturing context. The study also strives to enrich the extant literature by testing the mediating role of meaningful work in explaining the relationship between transformational leadership and employee innovation.

The Role of Ethical Leadership in Promoting Employee Innovative Work Behavior Mediated by the Perceived Meaningful Work Among the Ict Sector Staff in Oman

“…In the present study, we used meaningful work as a mediator since it is not investigated in previous studies with this set of exogenous and endogenous variables. The underlying argument for meaningful work as a mediator is that it is predicted by ethical leadership (Mostafa & Abed El-Motalib, 2020;Wang & Xu, 2019) and also found to be influencing employee innovative work behavior (Akgunduz et al, 2018;Pradhan & Jena, 2019;Tu & Lu, 2013). Thus, we expect that it may function as a mediator and connecting the two constructs.…”

“…This is because such employees are intrinsically motivated to work as they find their work significant, valuable, and purposeful (Tu & Lu, 2013). In other words, employees who find their work meaningful feel that their work is contributing to greater benefit for society which increases employees' willingness to make full use of their creative potential (Akgunduz, Alkan, & Gök, 2018;Pradhan & Jena, 2019). Therefore, we propose the following hypothesis.…”

Influence of Transformational Leadership on Employees’ Innovative Work Behavior in Sustainable Organizations: Test of Mediation and Moderation Processes

“…Transformational leadership bears all these key features (e.g., problem-solving, motivational indicators, and performance evaluation), which are required for creating and enhancing the employees' innovative work behavior [109]. Thus, previous empirical evidence revealed a [37,110,111] positive relationship between transformational leadership and innovative work behavior.…”

Sustainable Workplace: The Moderating Role of Office Design on the Relationship between Psychological Empowerment and Organizational Citizenship Behaviour in Uzbekistan

“…Transformational leadership behaviours motivate followers to perform at higher levels. There is extensive research examining the positive influence of transformational leadership on OCB [42][43][44], job satisfaction [45], well-being [46,47], innovative work behaviour [48,49] and psychological empowerment [50].…”