1 INTRODUCTION
4.1 Matching of creative and innovative individuals’ leadership
leadership preferences with actual leadership behaviors
The first question was: What are creative and innovative subordinates’
transformational leadership preferences and do their leaders’ leadership behaviors correspond with these needs? This question is investigated through three articles, the first two of which are concerned with subordinates’ leadership preferences and the third of which examines the actual strengths and weaknesses regarding transformational leadership. These three articles are examined to see whether transformational leaders are behaving in the ways that creative and innovative people would prefer, as presented in figure 3 below.
Figure 3. Approach to first sub-question
The first article, “Preferred leadership behaviors by different personalities”, views the question from the personality perspective, and in the second article,
“Transformational leadership in leading young innovators – a subordinate perspective”, the innovativeness level is used to make comparisons among leadership preferences.
Transformational leadership was the most preferred leadership behavior amongst all personality preferences, but some differences were found within the two dimensions of transformational leadership; for example, sensing people preferred inspirational motivation while intuitive people preferred intellectual stimulation. Intuitive persons want their leaders to display transformational leadership behaviors, particularly intellectual stimulation, in comparison to sensing persons. It also appears that extraverted and feeling persons prefer transformational leadership a bit more than introverted and thinking persons.
This supports the earlier findings of Hautala (2005), who found that extraverted and feeling persons need more external feedback and support, while introverted and thinking persons may do with less leadership.
Based on these results, managers and team leaders should focus most on the sensing-intuition differences among their subordinates. Sensing people focus on facts and things that can be sensed with their five senses, so it is quite natural that they would not mind if a leader is focused on tasks and they understand the need for more reporting and supervising. Perhaps most sensing people appreciate that they are getting information and clear deadlines and guidelines of how to proceed and see this as efficient management behavior. Meanwhile, intuitive people focus on insights, possibilities, and interrelationships instead of or in addition to hard facts. They prefer their leaders to stimulate them intellectually, that is, to encourage branching out. Intuitive people want leaders to support their natural strengths. They want to recognize patterns that are unseen and they want their leaders to help and stimulate them to transform.
Sensing people want this also but they also appreciate their leaders to stay close, set up goals, or offer means and deadlines.
This dissertation adds additional support to the findings of (Hautala 2005) that sensing people want clearly defined areas and instructions, and supports the findings that transformational leadership has positive outcomes. Subordinates find transformational leadership most preferable and intuitive people should be intellectually stimulated.
The aim was to look at what kind of leadership behaviors subordinates prefer in their leaders, and more specifically at whether and how personality influences those preferences. This issue has not been studied before using this framework.
This is important because it may prevent disappointment and help managers in developing themselves. Especially when leading challenging individuals or key talents this could be of importance. It could also be important in managing smaller teams or leading a small or micro company.
We only chose young respondents and divided them into innovators and non-innovators. Innovators are perhaps the key talents of today and tomorrow, but they are especially important for small economies. These individuals should be supported and led so that all their best competencies are brought out. Usually innovativeness (or its outcome) is used as a dependent variable, but as the key personnel, innovators should be the ones defining the leadership behaviors (Sharer 2013) instead of using existing generalizations of what is effective leadership. Participants consist of 282 university students; all were under the age of 30. Of those, the top 10 percentile was labelled as innovators, the lowest 25 percentiles as laggards, and the rest as the majority.
The results clearly indicate, as shown in table 6 below, that innovators do want their leaders to be transformational more than do the majority or laggards.
However, it is the intellectual stimulation that they seek especially, since motivation is just as important to them as it is to others, and they are less accepting of transactional behaviors. This supports earlier studies that have found innovative persons to be intrinsically motivated (Amabile 1997).
Table 6. Key results – personality and and preferences of transformational leadership
Innovators vs. majority Innovators > majority (r = .41)
Innovators > majority (r = .73)
Innovators vs. laggards Innovators > laggards (r = .65)
Innovators > laggards (r = .80)
Based on these findings we can assume that creative (intuitive) people and innovators would want their leaders to stimulate them intellectually, that is, to challenge them. This dissertation will next consider if that is something that leaders and CEOs are good at.
In the next article, “Transformational leadership and communication style of Finnish CEOs”, the length limitations of the paper demanded that we leave out much relevant information regarding transformational leadership, some of which is now included here.
First, we categorized the leaders into three groups based on their own evaluations of their transformational leadership behaviors. The first group appraised their skills as the weakest (below 25% quartile), the second group appraised their skills as moderate (between 25%-75%), and the leaders in the third group felt their leadership skills were at the very high level (highest 25% quartile). The means and the sizes of the groups can be seen in table 7 below. Then, a comparison was made between leaders in the low (G1), average (G2), and high (G3) groups.
Table 7. CEOs and transformational leadership dimensions
Group Enabling Modeling Intellectual stimulation
Rewarding Visioning Transformational G1.
As is evident from table 7, when viewing the score breakdown of group number 3, and the percentage of people in that group, there are some clear differences in the strengths and weaknesses of transformational leaders’. Transformational leaders were the least confident in the rewarding behaviors (very low scores) and visioning (only 12% evaluated their visioning high). The strongest transformational dimension was enabling (scores being the highest, and 30% of the leaders including in the highest scoring group). The next strength was modeling, with high scores and 28% of leaders feeling strong about their abilities.
Intellectual stimulation scores were higher than the modelling scores, but only 19% of the leaders felt they had high abilities in this area and a very high
percentage of 32% were in the lowest scoring group. Thus, we could conclude that even intellectual stimulation behaviors should receive more focus in leading innovators and leadership development.
The focus in the article was not in how that might influence innovators, thus that is not considered here. However, the implications of intellectual stimulation transformational leaders’ communication style for supporting innovators will be briefly evaluated her to increase our knowledge of how that area of transformational leadership could be developed; see the summary in table 8.
Intellectually stimulating leaders are foremost more controlled in their communication than other leaders, meaning they control their emotions and maintain a professional level in communication. They are also emotionally intelligent communicators, that is, they are polite and recognize other people’s feelings and take them into account. They also listen to and appreciate others’
input, and are able to convey their own messages efficiently. They are not insecure or avoiding in their style, which can be the case with other leaders.
Maintaining a controlled style in communication is helpful when it means that the leader does not lose his or her temper in times of difficulties or mistakes. But perhaps communication should not always be so controlled, as the effectiveness of challenging the status quo could be increased with surprising or dramatic ways of communication, which seems to be quite opposite of the controlled style.
Table 8. Strengths and weaknesses in transformational leadership and communication style of intellectual stimulation leaders
Present dimensions Least present dimensions
To conclude, from the managerial perspective, motivational leadership behaviors are the most important aspect. With innovators, more stimulating behaviors should be used and when leading the least creative bunch, rewarding behaviors become very important. Intellectual stimulation “enhanc[es] employees’ interest in, and awareness of problems, and increas[es] their ability to think about problems in new ways” (Bass 1985; as in Rafferty & Griffin 2004). This type of questioning and challenging of the status quo has been found to be negatively
associated with employees’ trust in their leaders (Podsakoff et al. 1990), which is in line with the current findings; non-innovators appreciate routines and may get stressed by changes and ambiguity, while their own preferences are encaging to others (Rafferty & Griffin 2004b). Recently it was found (Qu et al. 2015) that transformational leadership is positively related to subordinate creativity since it enhances subordinates’ identification with the leader, but only when the leader has set high creativity expectations. Thus, managers should communicate high expectations and challenge employees to look at things from new perspectives.