Leadership Research Summary:
- In order to foster collective creativity, the leader is seen to perform important functions in management or organization.
- Prior research tended to place more emphasis on the psychological and behavioral traits than on the dynamic leadership skills.
- Two experiments were run as part of this study to investigate the impact of emergent and elected leaders’ problem-solving-related utterances and turn-taking in discussion on group creativity. The study’s dynamic leadership behaviors in interpersonal interactions highlighted the part that leaders play in inspiring collective innovation.
- The findings of Experiment 1 demonstrated that, for emerging leaders, none of the statements made by leaders regarding problem solving differed from those made by followers, and statements made by leaders regarding retrospective summaries were positively related to the suitability of group creativity. In addition, leaders’ frequency of turns was higher than that of followers and was positively related to the suitability of group creativity.
- The findings of Experiment 2 demonstrated that, for elected leaders, statements about problem analysis, strategy planning, control and reflection, and retrospective summary were more frequent than those of followers, and that statements made by leaders about viewpoint generation were positively related to both novelty and appropriateness. However, the frequency of turns made by leaders was neither different from that of followers nor related to novelty or appropriateness.
Leadership Research Findings:
- Leaders took more turns during interpersonal interactions and did not conspicuously promote their personal opinions.
- Group inventiveness and leadership turn frequency were correlated.
- Leaders felt more responsibility and expressed more opinions once the position of leader was defined.
- The volume of elected leaders’ comments towards problem-solving was correlated with collective innovation.