رابطه ی هوش هیجانی رهبر و خلاقیت کارکنان: یک چارچوب مفهمومی مکانیسم The Relationship between Leader’s Emotional Intelligence and Employee Creativity: A Conceptual Framework of Mechanism

1. Introduction In the era of digital economy, where Information Technology [IT] has engraved as backbone for mainstream businesses, reliance on IT professional is more than ever before. The pace with which technological advancements take place these days will substitute both cognitive and manual routine tasks so that employees can engage themselves into more fulfilling roles. This will require employees to have skills such as emotional intelligence [EI] and creativity to tap their potential [1]. “Without EI, a person can have the best training in the world, an incisive, analytical mind, and an endless supply of smart ideas, but he still won’t make a great leader” [2]. As focus on people is at an all-time high in IT industry, this certainly has given tremendous impetus to communication and collaboration. To collaborate and communicate with each other effectively, EI has been increasingly recognized as critical skill for leaders to be successful in variety of situations [3-4]. Extant research also indicates that EI has captured tremendous interest of scholars and practitioners because it explains variations in leadership behavior [5-6]. Creativity is of paramount importance for today’s organizations in order to deal with volatile, complex and uncertain environment. On the other hand, Creativity has also become crucial for organizational innovation, survival and competitive advantage [7]. Moreover, in a survey “state of innovation” conducted by Boston Consulting Group in 2015, innovation was considered as one of the top priorities by senior executives for their companies [8]. As innovation continues to grow in its importance and creativity is the foundation of innovation, it has become crucial for leaders to unleash the creative potential of their employees. However, role of leader’s emotional intelligence in promoting employee creativity is understudied [9]. Gaining an understanding of the relationship of leader’s EI to creativity is significant for several reasons. First, prior research suggests that leadership is one of the most important predictors of creativity in organizations [10]. Thus, research on leader’s emotional intelligence can help advance knowledge regarding how leaders manifest their emotions and influence followers, as every interaction between leaders and followers involve emotions. Second, studies exploring the role of mediators/moderators in the relationship between leader’s emotional intelligence and employee outcomes are still lacking [11]. Thus, there is a need to better understand the underlying mechanisms of how leader’s EI exerts influence on creativity. Despite the fact that psychological climate perceptions have implications on employees’ attitudes and behaviors [13], little research has been done on exploring psychological climate as intervening variable between EI and employee outcomes [5-14]. Therefore, examining the psychological climate as a mechanism may help in understanding the relationship of leader’s EI to creativity. Furthermore, researchers have suggested that examining leader member exchange [LMX] as boundary conditions between leader’s behavior and employee outcomes will help in extending our understanding of this relationship [15]. This gap needs to be filled as depending on the situation, there can be differential effects of EI [16]. In order to fill this void, we propose LMX as boundary condition which will determine the situation in which leaders will have more creative employees. Therefore, purpose of this study is to fill these identified gaps by proposing an integrative framework illustrated in Figure1 that attempts to explore simultaneously the role of psychological climate and LMX in the relationship between leader’s emotional intelligence and creativity.