The influence of transformational leadership on individual and team innovativeness in the hospital sector in the United Arab Emirates

• Main Author: Al-Farhan, M.
• Published: Nottingham Trent University 2018
• Online Access: https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.748563

Healthcare organisations assume best practice as they implement and monitor the latest clinical evidence available. However, this approach can result in rapid increase in costs in order to stay up to date with state-of-the-art developments, inflicting budget constraints that work at the expenses of soft people management issues. This can render attempts to apply simple healthcare innovations difficult. Past literature suggested that leadership plays an important role in individual and team innovation. In this project, I draw on the idea that transformational leadership is capable of encouraging social interactions within a team and thereby fosters individual and team innovativeness. I set to investigate the role of knowledge sharing and team reflexivity in explaining how transformational leadership encourages innovativeness. Moreover, ample evidence suggests that new knowledge increases innovativeness. By applying this logic, should we expect individuals and teams deficient in new knowledge acquisition opportunities not to be innovative? Would followers socially interact differently in this case? Also, would transformational leaders be able to counteract knowledge deficiency in order to drive innovativeness? The gap in the literature this study attempt to satisfy is whether under transformational leadership, different social interaction mechanisms are triggered in reaction to different levels of external knowledge acquisition in order to drive innovativeness. This study provide evidence that under conditions of fewer new knowledge acquisition opportunities, the emphasis on the team leader as the main driver of team innovativeness increases. On the other hand, where new knowledge acquisition opportunities are abundant, transformational leadership influence on teams innovativeness will increasingly be mediated through team reflexivity levels. The study result is discussed using two faces of transformational leadership framework (Kark and Shamir 2002; Kark et al., 2003). These findings are stronger at the team level than the individual level where the study data did not generate statistically significant associations.