This paper aims to explore the importance of leadership in the current innovative world, where many businesses are venturing into innovating new ways of doing business to grow. Creativity in any company does not occur by accident; leaders must drive the changes in structure, culture, and process to achieve growth. Therefore, creativity and innovation are what drives business success in any sector; leaders must collectively implement strategies that encourage change. They are vital to the entrepreneurship that makes new businesses get started and that sustain a present trade; they're catalysts that drive organizational growth. Therefore, leaders must ensure companies achieve constant innovation through establishing a favorable environment to renovate and shape the managerial culture that inspires creativity and innovation. Additionally, leaders must encourage and manage diversity in the company and cultivates an effective leadership structure that sustains the innovation process. Leaders must apply leadership theory that is favorable to the organization.
How Leaders Encourage Creativity and Innovation
Innovation is not dependent on the participation of high-status executive positions but on all workers who know their customers and the exact needs. In this way, they will analyze their competitors, assess the industry, products, and evolving role of technology. Therefore leaders should see, plant, nurture, and share opportunities with employees. According to Yoshida et al. (2014), servant leaderships affect both employee creativity and group innovation. Also, servant leadership encourages employee rational, empathy, and collective participation, which results in fostering individual creativeness and team innovation. Additionally, leaders should create a conducive climate for change; the mediated result of leader empathy is most reliable when the team environment for innovation is high. Leaders can do this by ensuring friendly and inclusive conditions for the members.
Leaders should effectively encourage organisational creativity and innovation through scheming businesses to adopt an environment that is conducive to flourish. They should identify what the organisations take for granted Hughes et al., (2018) and improve on it. Chen and Hou's (2016) study shows that the voice behavior of followers serves as a way of reflecting on how ethical leadership affects individual creativity. Therefore, to inspire creativity and innovation, leaders must ensure there is a significant relationship between employee's awareness and staff voice behavior, the voice behavior should positively link to individual creativity. Also, the leader should ensure the secondary effect of ethical leadership on their creativity through voice behavior. Through these, leaders will provide creativity and innovation.
Chen et al. (2016), studies show that organisations with friendlier workplace achieve more innovative success, mostly where innovation is challenging to achieve. Leaders should ensure that employee has a welcoming workplace that helps them develop lenience to failure, which consequently encourages engagement in innovation. Additionally, organisational reassurance, time pressure, resource allocation, staff freedom, and teamwork have an impact on the creative workplace; enhance the creativity of the staff and performance of the business achieved. Leadership has to consider these factors to foster creativity in employees.
The Importance of Leaders in the Innovation Process
Innovative leaders are original visionaries who have vast ideas, and they can inspire people around them to turn those ideas into reality. Koen et al. (2014 analysis revealed that for a business to achieve front-end performance, specific leadership attributes must in place, which include senior management commitment, vision strategies, capitals, and culture. According to Khalili (2016), organisations should capitalize on transformational leadership training and selection of leaders with this leadership ability if they aim at adopting and improving employee creativity and innovation. Besides, the company should invest in climate improvements to ensure a vibrant platform for being creative and innovative in the workplace.
Therefore, organization structure, technology, and other management tools bring effectiveness and competitive advantage to the business. However, these alone cannot fetch the competitive edge, leaders must stare at the change; they are the most significant source of competitive advantage. Özarallı (2015) stated that current businesses are facing challenges in creating a corporate ethos that improves creativity and innovation in employees. Thus, leaders must influence it, though organisations must empower leaders for them to affect the same to employee creativity. Leaders must inspire their followers.
Consequently, leaders empowering behavior have a strong influence on seeming creativity when staff feels empowered than when such a mental state of mind is low. According to Slåtten and Mehmetoglu (2015), transformational leadership and worker creativity behavior expressively affect business innovation or growth. Thus, workers will willingly place the company or group interest before their interests; hence the business will achieve change.
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Organisation culture is a crucial determinant for business innovation, and it can foster it, although it can still act as a wall against change. Naranjo-Valencia et al. (2016) show that company culture can inspire or confine innovation, hence affects company performance. The study on Spanish industrial companies shows that organisational culture is the best innovation and performance, interpreter. Therefore, the organization culture, as leaders install it, is a link between leadership and innovation. According to Serrat (2017), creativity is the most significant human input of all, without which there would be no growth, and companies would be reiterating the same patterns. That is to imply that creativity is key to business survival, and leaders should be keen on it. The main aim of a company's existence is to satisfy the need of its customers and the target market while building innovation capabilities desired for a robust set of abilities and gear activities toward serving the market needs and organisation objectives, Racela, (2014).
Current leadership issues in the changing world
No matter how hard a business strives to create unwavering health organization, companies have and will always experience stagy changes beyond its control. As a result, leadership is facing the same challenges or issues since they are the same people driving the organisation growth, Eberhardt and Majkovic (2016). Therefore, leaders are fighting to develop and relevant skills that will ensure effectiveness, tactical thinking, and decision making, among others. They need to address the issue of motivating and inspiring followers to ensure they are satisfied with the jobs and that they can deliver through creativity and innovation. Accordingly, leaders are unable to instill pride and offer support, especially where they are leading a big team. Abalkhail (2017) stated that women leaders, in most cases, were banned from attaining equitable representation in the leadership positions, which makes it difficult for them to manage stakeholders, hence affecting creativity and innovation. Moreover, this brings a challenge in mobilising, and change, difficult for leaders to overcome the issues on resistance to change.
Critical analysis skills for leadership
The leader must know that by taking direction critical thinking process, they are taking action to decision making and process solving approaches. They put companies in a sturdier position that leads to success in the business world. According to Collins (2014), leaders must apply wise judgmental that enable them to make to make a sound decision. Additionally, Ay, et al. (2015) research stated that self-leadership and critical thinking were the essential factors presented to the students to be useful in future organisations quality decision making. It means that there is a positive relationship between self-leadership dimensions and critical thinking. Leaders should exercise critical thinking skills when making decisions and influence employees, which will make them have creative skills that will drive innovations. Innovation begins with people through making the human capital within the staff. Van Laar et al. (2017) research shows that 21st-century digital skills are driving organisations' effectiveness and innovation capacity. Leadership should strive towards developing human capital that will ensure a competitive advantage in the market or industry. Thus, leaders should apply these core skills; technical, problem-solving, communication, creativity, and critical thinking, among others, to ensure good leadership, Liaw, et al. (2014). The same skills should be shared with the followers since innovation must apply in the entire team.
Appropriate leadership theoretical concepts for creativity and innovation
According to İşcan et al. (2014) study, James Macgregor Burns identified two types of transformational leadership theories that are still applicable to date. They include transitional where the leader influences others by what they offer in exchange, and the transformational model, which show how leaders interact with followers to raise their level of motivation and molarity. Among the theories, the transformational concept seems to merge well with creativity and innovation. Kao et al. (2015). The study accepts a dual outlook approach that considers both motivation and social-political method to provoke further the effect of transformational leadership (TFL) on the service innovation behavior of frontline employees. The concept influences the employee to have creative self-efficacy and expected image gains. Bai and Li, (2016) study support transformational leadership too, and the emphasis that employee creativity is key to organisation growth and, more so on, team dynamics. However, the research shows that there is team skirmish and knowledge sharing involved but still support this concept. Therefore, through learning alignment, transformational leadership (TFL) and employee creativity seem to have a positive relationship. Jyoti, and Dev (2015), the study carried on by Airtel and Aircel call centers of J and K (India), show that leaders promote employees' creativity, finds it viable to train and test high caliber candidates who have the potential of becoming transformational leaders. Thus, this leadership concept yields positive results in the form of employee creativity, which can generate a competitive advantage for the organisation.
Encourage and enable collaboration.
As discussed earlier, transformational leadership involves learning and knowledge sharing, which is a fundamental concept to encourage and enable collaboration amongst team members. According to Piscicelli et al. (2015), collaboration is a socio-economic model based on sharing, swapping, and borrowing, among others, that allows the use of network technology to attract idle assets and promote re-use of possessions that are no longer wanted. Through collaboration, sharing, and communicating with others, offer employees an enriched opportunity for learning. Leaders should encourage and enable collaboration to drive the innovation that the company aims to achieve; since followers can learn from each other as well from the leaders, Hsu et al. (2014). Since collaboration is about sharing, leaders and their followers will as well share their problems that affect their development or organisation challenges and come up with a solution. It becomes a team problem, hence solving it through brainstorming encourages participation; therefore, followers will feel being part of solution-solver, thus motivates them, Tausczik et al. (2014, February), the study of Math Overflow. Through collaboration, leaders are informed of followers' reactions and can take the corrective measure to address the issue in advance before it escalates, according to Panagiotopoulos et al. (2014) study.
Additionally, leaders should encourage Intra team trust and performance because, according to De Jong et al., (2016), they contribute to team performance. The research shows that the trust performance relationship is depending on the level of the task performed, skills differentiation in the team, among others. Leaders must show trust to the followers to encourage team trust among members.
Therefore, leadership in any business is a vital aspect of organisational creativity and innovation.
Companies must ensure they have an excellent team of leaders to implement the changes, to guide the employee and give guidance in terms of decision making. Additionally, a company should have creative leaders to manage the innovation process. Leaders should design an organisational culture and climate that is favorable and allows creativity development. Also, the way leaders manage diversity and ensure employee satisfaction will determine if the employee will be resistant to the changes or not. They should provide friendliness to the staff and motivation while watching on time contains or duration for the difference. Innovation should be implemented in phases to ensure its effectiveness. Leaders should know that they are the catalyst to the creativity and innovation changes, and thus, they should drive the change through thinking critically and making the right decisions. Finally, leaders should know that motivated employees strive to work to better develop themselves and for company growth. According to the transformational leadership concept, as illustrated above, leaders who want to drive creativity and innovation should apply the same in their business to achieve their goals. They should allow knowledge sharing between leaders and followers and among teams.
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