Leading for creativity: The role of unconventional leader behavior

This paper examines the relationship between a leader's unconventional behavior and followers' creative performance at both the individual and group level in an experimental setting. Our results indicate that after transformational leadership and individual intrinsic motivation for creativity are controlled for, unconventional leader behavior (e.g., standing on furniture, hanging ideas on clotheslines) significantly interacts with follower perceptions of the leader as a role model for creativity to explain follower creativity. Results also suggest that unconventional behavior explains variance in group cohesion above and beyond transformational leadership, and that group cohesion interacts with group intrinsic motivation to explain group creative performance. Academic and practitioner implications are discussed, as are avenues for future research in this area. (C) 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.