Positive affectivity neutralizes transformational leadership's influence on creative performance and organizational citizenship behaviors

Abstract

SummaryThis study uses an interactionist approach to examine the moderating effect of follower trait positive affectivity (trait PA) on the relation between transformational leadership and both follower creative performance and organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB). On the basis of responses from 212 employees and their direct supervisors from the research and development department of a company in Mainland China, results support the hypothesized moderation effect. Specifically, the positive influence of transformational leadership on creative performance was significantly reduced for followers who were higher on trait PA (ΔR 2 = .02, p < .05). The same pattern, in which followers' trait PA appeared to substitute for the influence of transformational leadership, generalized to the outcome of follower OCB as well (ΔR 2 = .04, p < .01). We discussed theoretical and practical implications of these findings. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.Keywords: interactionist approach; transformational leadership; creative performance; organizational citizenship behaviors; trait positive affectivity Employee creative performance and organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB) have been identified as advantageous for organizations (creativity: Amabile, 1996;Shalley, Zhou, & Oldham, 2004; OCB: Podsakoff, Whiting, Podsakoff, & Blume, 2009). Creative performance refers to the generation of new and useful products, procedures, and/or services in organizations (Woodman, Sawyer, & Griffin, 1993), and OCB refers to "performance that supports the social and psychological environment in which task performance takes place" (Organ, 1997, p. 95). In the organizational context, leadership has been identified as a key situational factor that may substantially influence these two valuable employee behaviors (e.g., creative performance: Tierney, Farmer, & Graen, 1999; OCB: Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Paine, & Bachrach, 2000). More specifically, transformational leadership has received considerable attention from leadership researchers (e.g., Avolio, Bass, & Jung, 1999) and has been found to positively predict both employee creative performance (Shin & Zhou, 2003) and OCB (Piccolo & Colquitt, 2006). Transformational leadership can be defined as "moving the follower beyond immediate self-interests through idealized influence (charisma), inspiration, intellectual stimulation, or individualized consideration" (Bass, 1999, p. 11). However, extant theoretical and empirical treatments of the positive link between transformational leadership and both creative performance and OCB (e.g., for metaanalysis, see Wang, Oh, Courtright, & Colbert, 2011) provide bases for suggesting that these links are more complex than previously thought.In this study, we adopted an interactionist approach (interactionist approach assumes that the determinants of behavior include an interaction between situational factors and person factors: Amabile, 1996;George & Zhou, 2001;Oldham & Cummings, 1996;Woodman et al., 1993) Research Article leadership and creative perform...

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