Does Meaningful Work Explains the Relationship Between Transformational Leadership and Innovative Work Behaviour?

Abstract

Executive Summary

Transformational leaders motivate their followers to relook their job by elevating the status of the job from being boring, repetitive and menial into something more meaningful and significant. This ascendance of employee’s job as something important and its contribution to overall organizational vision is what prompts them to engage in innovative work behaviour. Therefore, it would be interesting to test the indirect effect of transformational leadership on followers’ innovative work behaviour as mediated through followers’ perception of meaningful work.

The current study is set to serve two purposes. First, to clear the confusion regarding the findings related to transformational leadership’s influence on employee’s innovative work behaviour. Second, to investigate the mediating role of meaningful work in explaining the relationship between transformational leadership and innovative work behaviour. Data was collected from two samples, Sample I (349 executives) and Sample II (539 executives), working in two different manufacturing organizations in Eastern India.

The results of both the samples confirm that transformational leadership significantly influences employee’s innovative work behaviour. Also, the study (both Samples I and II) finds meaningful work to partially mediate the relationship between transformational leadership and employees’ innovation. In order to lend further credibility to our mediation finding, we carried out Sobel test and bootstrapping technique to strengthen our assertion.

This study replicates previous empirical investigations by exploring the relationship between transformational leadership and employee’s innovative behaviour at work in Indian manufacturing context. The study also strives to enrich the extant literature by testing the mediating role of meaningful work in explaining the relationship between transformational leadership and employee innovation.