Empowerment Effects on Creative Behaviors in a Multiple Project Team Membership Context: An Individual-level Analysis

Leader empowerment and employee creativity are critical sources of organizational competitive advantage in today’s turbulent business environment. Accordingly, these issues have been widely explored in previous studies but have not been considered within a multiple team membership (MTM) context. MTM has grown rapidly, and is now a popular form of management practice, especially in knowledge-intensive jobs that require employees to undertake complex, uncertain, and non-routine projects. MTM represents simultaneous affiliations with several project teams, indicating exposure to several leaders, colleagues, roles, and atmospheres. Thus, leadership effects may vary along with the dynamics created by MTM contexts. In the present research, we relied upon the attention-based view as the overarching theory and empirically examined the research agenda with a sample of 423 professional researchers. Using the Mplus 7.4 statistics package, we found results supporting our assertion that the mediation processes of the focal leader’s empowerment leads to creative employee behaviors via their perception of creative self-efficacy. Among the MTM factors, role conflicts negatively moderated the effect of the focal leader’s empowerment on creative self-efficacy, while the positive moderation effect of time allocation was marginally significant. The results support the importance of considering MTM context in understanding empowerment and creativity. Theoretical and practical contributions are included.