Enhancing innovation and creativity through servant leadership

Creativity is of vital importance for organizations that compete in globally operating markets faced with market dynamics and determined to stay ahead of the competition. In such organizations, employees have to constantly generate products and services that are original and innovative (for example, Basadur, 2004). In this light, many studies suggest that the maintenance and/or improvement of intrinsic motivation among individual employees in the workplace is key to the proper management of organizational creativity (Amabile, 1996). In the organizational context, there is a growing need for adequate knowledge on the relationship between leadership and creativity (Zhou and Shalley, 2008), particularly given the crucial influence that leadership exerts on the learning processes that are so vital to creativity. Servant leadership theory may be specifically suited for understanding the management of creativity and innovation because of its employee-focused nature, which aims at enhancing the intrinsic motivation of employees. In this chapter, we present a model for servant leadership and creativity, building on the observation that the encouragement of followers, largely, to manage their own work is not only the defining feature of a servant-leader, but is also the key element in the management of creativity in the organizational setting.