The effect of leadership styles and creative self-efficacy on innovatite work behaviour of public sector employees in Sabah: the mediating role of leader member exchange / Md Faidzal Mit Dahlan

Innovation is an essential element to the public sectors. Undeniably, innovation can be primary sources of productivity growth, cost-savings and improvements that have beneficial impact in providing quality services in public sector. In the context of globalization, the public service needs to enhance its efficiency and effectiveness in meeting citizen’s demands. The government needs to continuously renew and improve their offerings in anticipating and responding to change more quickly and effectively. This is because the rate of technological, social, and institutional changes results is only for shorter life cycles. An organization’s ability to innovate is highly depended on the quality of its employees. Contextually, public servants are regarded as being an important mechanism in realizing innovation. Besides, the Leadership and creative self-efficacy fits today’s innovation-oriented organizations that are devoted to assisting employees in exploiting their creative potential. Therefore, the motivation of this present study is to examine the influence of leadership styles namely servant, authentic and empowering together with creative self-efficacy (CSE) towards leader member exchange (LMX) and IWB in the public sector. This study was made based on the survey conducted in February 2019; at various federal government departments in Sabah comprising of 500 participants with Grade 41 level and above and non-probability purposive sampling was applied. Reflective and formative measurement model were used to examine the construction of the questionnaire and the relationship among leadership style, CSE, IWB and leader member exchange (LMX) were tested by applying the PLS-Structural Equation Model (PLS-SEM) technique. The final findings indicated that authentic leadership and creative self-efficacy had no supportive influence on leader member exchange, but on the other hand, the influence of empowering was supported on IWB. Contrary to what was hypothesized, servant leadership did not support IWB. Moreover, the result revealed that LMX had positive support on IWB and mediated the relationship between servant and empowering leadership and IWB. In conclusion, this research makes several theoretical contributions and provides further insights on the innovation work behaviour, particularly in Malaysia. Methodological and practical implications were discussed and several potential avenues for future research were identified and proposed. In short, this research helps to produce a segment in a more inclusive global picture of the leadership styles, creative self-efficacy, and innovation.