title: The Impact of Leadership on Employee Creativity and Organisational Innovation A case study on Boehringer Ingelheim’s Middle East Turkey and Africa organization
Creators: name: Yildiz, Alaattinlevent
Publisher: name: University of Liverpool Repository
Year: 2020

description: Abstract: Organisations need to create competitive advantage in frequently changing business environments to grow, lead and survive. In order to achieve competitive advantage, organisations need to be more creative and innovative than they used to be. Therefore, establishing a creative and innovative culture in organisations is of utmost importance. Hence, organisations should achieve creativity at the individual level and innovation at the organisational level. Also, in today`s organiations, leaders have a pivotal role and impact on employee and organisational performance. Accordingly, leader`s influence and relationship with followers becomes crucial since it determines follower`s and organisational performance. Thus, the leadership style influences and impacts follower’s creativity and organisational innovation. The goal of this study is to identify the impact of effective leadership style and behaviour on the employee creativity and organisational innovation at Boehringer Ingelheim (BI). BI is a German pharmaceutical company, with offices in Turkey, the Middle East and Africa (META) and the head office is based in Dubai, UAE. Also, I aim to define the attributes of leader`s behaviours which are likely to enhance employees’ new idea generation, innovation and execution behaviour. In this research, I have selected participative action research as the methodology and the qualitative method to identify effective leadership styles and its consequences on employee creativity and organisational innovation. This has led to a new leadership proposal to enhance active leadership practice. In the qualitative method, I have followed the phenomenological approach to collect and analyse the data since I focused on the shared experience of effective leadership styles and their influence in terms of creativity and innovation on subordinates, as well as the organisation. The data collection was through an online channel in which participants received anonymous online questionnaires with open ended questions and filled them out. Afterwards, I extracted the data from each of the participants from the internal server and made the analysis accordingly The findings of this study indicated that the effective leadership trend at BI META organisation is mainly through the directive leadership style, along with achievement-oriented leadership behaviour, which are less supportive and participative than other leadership styles. In this sense, this leadership style takes care of performance and places great value on outcomes, rather than employees. Also, business directions and strategies always come from top to bottom without engaging followers in any decision-making process. Furthermore, there is a lack of proactivity of subordinates when it comes to bringing creative ideas forward and executing them in the organisation. The reason is that subordinates believe that there is not much room for them to be proactive since effective leadership does not create such a platform to speak up and execute their ideas. Lastly, subordinates commented that the organisation is bureaucratic and it prevents organisations becoming innovative.