How Does Ethical Leadership Relate to Team Creativity? The Role of Collective Team Identification and Need for Cognitive Closure

We investigate how and when ethical leadership predicts team creativity. With its strong compliance with organizational norms and procedures, ethical leadership can be seen as antithetical to creativity. Similarly, collective need for cognitive closure can negatively impact creativity as this is a motivational tendency toward making quick decisions and avoiding open-ended processes. However, we argue that they both can have a positive effect on team creativity when collective team identification is considered as an underlying mechanism. Accordingly, we hypothesize that ethical leadership fosters team creativity via strengthening collective team identification, and collective need for cognitive closure positively moderates the indirect relationship between ethical leadership and team creativity via collective team identification. We studied 55 teams in a food-services organization in South Korea in a multi-wave and multi-source design and found support for our hypotheses.