Does Consideration and Initiating Structure Leadership Help or Hinder Employees’ Creativity? The Role of Psychological Ownership and Time Availability

Leadership style has become an important factor affecting employee creativity, and exploring the mechanism of leadership style’s influence on employee creativity has become a very worthwhile research direction. The issue of whether leaders prioritize the well-being of their employees or prioritize the establishment of rules can be a nuanced one, particularly in areas that place a high value on humanistic care, such as China. Therefore, in order to explore the mechanism between leadership style and employee creativity, this paper based on the theories of leadership behavior, creativity, and so on adopts the method of questionnaire survey and focuses on exploring the relationship between leadership style and employees’ creativity from the perspective of leader’s consideration and initiating structure. Using survey data from employees in 213 small- and medium-sized enterprise of China Zhejiang province, we find that consideration and initiating structure leadership both have positive influences on employees’ creativity through psychological ownership for organization, and time availability plays a positive moderating role. This study demonstrates the mechanism of leader’s consideration and initiating structure on employee creativity at the theoretical level, providing a clear picture of how business leaders can effectively stimulate employee creativity. In contrast to existing research, this paper illustrates the effects of leader’s consideration and initiating structure on employee psychology from two different perspectives, namely, employee well-being and rule-making, respectively, to further illustrate the mechanism of action on employee creativity, which is less addressed in current research.