Roles of Authentic Leadership, Psychological Empowerment and Intrinsic Motivation on Workers’ Creativity in e-business

Abstract

In today’s rapidly changing environment, companies need to have proper strategies in place to meet the challenges that constant change presents. Being flexible, responding and adapting to changes can be valuable. However, they are essentially passive ways of dealing with situations. Creating new values and innovation are more active and effective strategies fora constantly changing environment. As such, most companies in e-business should focus on developing creativity across the board. Employees’ creativity has become a critical factor in e-business. This paper explains how to increase workers’ creativity through authentic leadership and psychological empowerment. As it is not machines or computers, but people, that are ultimately still responsible for creating novel outcomes, this study emphasizes the overriding importance of members’ ability and leader’s roles, which greatly influence followers’ levels of motivation. Authentic leadership encourages members to reach and display their potential, and enhances their intrinsic motivation. Moreover, members’ psychological empowerment is directly associated with both intrinsic motivation and autonomy, preconditions for creativity. Hence, these two dimensions- leadership and an individual’s psychological state- will increase workers’ creativity, which works to increase performance and create more opportunities not only at the individual level, but also at the team or organization level. The purpose of this paper is to explain the effects of authentic leadership on creativity and the moderating effects of psychological empowerment between authentic leadership and creativity in the e-business environment.