Impact of Transformational and Authentic Leadership on Employee Creativity in Malaysian Higher Education Sector: Mediating Effect of Organizational Citizenship Behaviour

Abstract

Although transformational and authentic leadership have received high attention in the earlier literature, it is hard to find a study that examined their effects on employee creativity and used organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB) as a mediator between them, particularly in higher learning institutions’ context. Therefore, this research aims to contribute to the empirical literature by testing the impact of authentic leadership and transformational leadership on employee creativity and verifying the mediating effect of OCB on the association between them. This research adopted the quantitative approach in which a survey method was utilized for gathering the data from a sample of 243 staff in higher education institutions in Malaysia. During data analysis, the partial least square method was used for checking the reliability in addition to the validity of the research instrument and verify the proposed hypotheses. The outcomes confirmed that OCB has a positive effect on employee creativity. Additionally, the findings indicated that authentic and transformational leadership have positive effects on OCB and employee creativity. Finally, the results revealed that OCB fully mediates the association between the selected leadership types and employee creativity.