The Effect of Empowering Leadership on Creativity: Applying a Social Information Processing Perspective

Previous research shows that empowering leaders facilitate employee creativity and has focused on employees’ psychological or motivation processes as the mechanism. Applying a social information processing perspective, the current study explores the roles of broader social contexts-coworkers and family- in the empowering leadership-employee creativity relationship. Using multisource survey data collected from 158 unique manager-employee dyads in South Korea, the authors found that coworker knowledge sharing mediates the positive impact of empowering leadership on employee creativity. This mediating effect was statistically meaningful over and beyond that of a commonly studied mediator, self-efficacy. Furthermore, work-family conflict was found to be an important boundary condition that moderates the indirect effect of empowering leadership on employee creativity via coworker knowledge sharing. These findings highlight the critical role of social contexts in the empowering leadership-employee creativity relationship.