How leadership matters in organizational innovation: a perspective of openness

Purpose The purpose of this study is to answer the following two questions: (1) What are the influences of the top managers’ different leadership styles on organizational innovation? (2) What is the mechanism by which the different leaderships exert different effects on organizational innovation? Design/methodology/approach To test the hypothesized model, a data set based on 133 MBA part-time students from Tsinghua University and Zhejiang University in China was built, after interviewing several top managers as a pilot study. With the help of SPSS macro, hierarchical regression and bootstrapping analysis, the paper analyzes the effects of two leadership styles on innovation performance, through the mediation mechanism of openness involving open breadth and open depth. Findings Our results indicate that transformational leadership enhances, while transactional leadership reduces, the organizational innovation performance. The openness breadth and openness depth not only mediate the beneficial effect of tra...