Authentic leadership as an energy booster for service creativity: The mediating role of access to strategic information and the moderating role of work passion

Based on the self-determination theory (SDT), this paper formulates and tests a moderated mediation model to explore the nexus between authentic leadership, access to strategic information, employee work passion, and service creativity of employees. A sample of 364 frontline employees of Malaysian hospitality sector was used to gather the data. Using structural equation modeling in Mplus, the results confirm that authentic leadership has a positive impact on access to strategic information and employee service creativity. Moreover, access to strategic information mediates between Authentic leadership and employee service creativity. Results also support the moderating effects of employee work passion between access to strategic information and employee service creativity. This study extends SDT by conceptualizing access to strategic information as a motivational factor and by identifying employee work passion as an important boundary condition in the leadership-creativity relationship. • This study extends the literature on the topic by demonstrating how authentic leadership contributes to service creativity. • Additionally, it examined access to strategy-related information, which has been overlooked in hospitality research. • Finally, this study advances employee work passion as a key variable hypothetically moderating the effect that access to strategy-related information has on service creativity, which is a research gap that had not yet been examined in the literature.