How Does Entrepreneurial Leadership Foster Creativity among Employees and Teams?

Most research on creativity shows that importance of leadership behaviors. In this multilevel study, we shift the focus of leaderships in a narrow sense by exploring the relationship among entrepreneurial leadership, creative efficacy beliefs, and creativity. The results are based on a sample of 237 employees from 43 teams in China. Drawing on social cognitive theory, we found that entrepreneurial leadership is positively related to employee and team creativity, both directly and through the mediating role of both creative self-efficacy and team creative efficacy. Furthermore, the results showed a cross-level influence in which team creative efficacy, as a team-level attribute, mediates the entrepreneurial leadership-employee creativity relation. In sum, this research contributes to our knowledge of whether and how entrepreneurial leadership predicts creativity at both the individual and team level. Implications for both research and practice are discussed.