Impact of Transformational Leadership on Creative Flexibility of Engineers in India

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1 Available online at Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 57 ( 2012 ) International Conference on Asia Pacific Business Innovation & Technology Management 2012 Impact of Transformational Leadership on Creative Flexibility of Engineers in India Pankaj Sharma a, Dr. Pankaj Nagar b, Dr. S.C. Pathak c a Pankaj Sharma, Research Scholar, MNIT, Jaipur,India(Corresponding Author) b Dr. Pankaj Nagar Asstt. Professor, University of Rajasthan Jaipur,INDIA c Dr. S.C. Pathak, Professor, Deptt. Of Mechanical Engineering, MNIT, Jaipur, INDIA Abstract Creative Flexibility and Idea Fluency can be thought of as the cornerstones of Creative Thinking. But while fluency is about generating as many ideas as possible, Flexibility is about generating ideas that are different from each other. Thinking flexibly is a valuable skill because it allows you to get out of a "thinking rut" in order to come up with a whole new idea. This article is an attempt to investigate effect of transformational leadership on creative flexibility of Engineers working in automobile sector Published by by Elsevier Ltd. Ltd. Selection and/or and/or peer-review under under responsibility of the of Asia the Pacific Asia Business Pacific Business Innovation Innovation and Technology and Technology Management Management Society (APBITM) Society (APBITM). Open access under CC BY-NC-ND license. Keywords: Creative Flexibility, Transformational Leadership 1. Literature Review. Innovation through creativity is an important factor in the success and competitive advantage of organizations (Woodman, Sawyer, and Griffin, 1993) 1 as well as for a strong economy (Drucker, 1985) 2. Today, almost all organizations are facing a dynamic environment characterized by rapid technological change, shortening product life cycles, and globalization. Organizations, especially technologically-driven ones, need to be more creative and innovative than before to survive, to compete, to grow, and to lead (Jung, Chow and Wu, 2003) 3 ; Tierney, Farmer and Graen, ). Interest is growing in the influence of transformational leadership on creativity and innovation. Transformational leaders raise the performance expectations of their followers (Bass, 1995) 5 and "seek a Pankaj Sharma, Tel ,Emai :engps_sharma@yahoo.co.in Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of the Asia Pacific Business Innovation and Technology Management Society (APBITM) Open access under CC BY-NC-ND license. doi: /j.sbspro

2 556 Pankaj Sharma et al. / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 57 ( 2012 ) to transform followers' personal values and self-concepts and move them to higher level of needs and aspirations" (Jung, 2001) 6. There are several possible mechanisms through which TFL may enhance employee individual creativity. For example, transformational leaders encourage followers to challenge the status quo and experiment with new and different approaches to their work (i.e. intellectual stimulation; Bass et al., 2003) 7 First, transformational leaders challenge followers thoughts and imaginations, recognize their creative values, beliefs, and mind-set, develop individual employees and work teams' capabilities, provide resources and support and give them discretion to act, and energize followers to work harder toward achieving higher targets (Bass, 1985) 8, all of which could help develop followers' self-views of being creative. Transformational leaders encourage followers to challenge the status quo and experiment with new and different approaches to their work (i.e., intellectual stimulation; Bass et al., 2003) 7 Transformational leaders also create new learning opportunities for followers to grow, give followers discretion to act, and show appreciation and support of followers individual consideration; Bass et al., (2003) 7 Transformational leaders develops mechanisms for effective conflict resolution, encouragement of interaction and information exchange among group members, and fostering cooperation in performing collective tasks of Shin & Zhou, (2007) 9 and Vera & Crossan, (2004) 10 Taken together, transformational leaders may facilitate the establishment of a strong work group creative identity by developing group capability to effectively use its members' diverse expertise, while also searching for new and better ways of completing group work. 2. Transformational Leadership The idea of transformational leadership started with James McGregor Burns approximately three decades ago. Burns (1978) 11 The transformational leader has been characterized as one who articulates a positive vision of the future that can be shared with subordinates and among peers, pays high attention to diversity and intellectually stimulates subordinates to perform beyond what they think is possible for them (Yammarino & Bass, 1990) 12 Components of Transformational Leadership The key interrelated components of transformational leadership include inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, idealized influence, and individualized consideration Inspirational Motivation Inspirational Motivation represented the appeal of challenging followers by symbols, and metaphors. In other words, inspirational motivation leaders expressed the importance and value of desired goals in simple ways and displayed high levels of expectations. Thus, followers reacted by willingly increasing their efforts to attain the vision. Although charisma and inspirational motivation leadership were often highly correlated, inspirational leadership might or might not overlap with charismatic leadership. It depended on the extent to which followers seek to identify with the leaders (Bass and Avolio, 1993) 13

3 Pankaj Sharma et al. / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 57 ( 2012 ) Intellectual Stimulation referred to leaders who challenged their followers ideas and values for solving problems. Through intellectual stimulation, transformational leaders are able to show their followers new ways of looking at old problems. Such leaders encouraged their followers to use nontraditional thinking to deal with traditional problems and they often listened to followers ideas even if different from theirs. The message was that followers should feel free to try out new approaches, and their ideas will not be publicly criticized because they differ from those of the leader (Coad and Berry, 1998,) Idealized Influence. Idealized Influence referred to leaders who encouraged followers to share their visions and goals. These leaders had strong personal appeal (Comer, Jolson, Dubinsky, and Yammarino, 1995) 6 and power to influence over his/her subordinates by providing clear vision, a strong sense of purpose and perseverance to achieve the most difficult objectives Creative Flexibility This is the capability of an individual to transfer from one group to another, thereby expressing mental flexibility as well as ease of mental position. Guilford found that there are kinds of flexibility: spontaneous flexibility and adaptive-flexibility. Spontaneous flexibility is the ability to produce a diversified cluster of thoughts free of dormancy and inertia. Adaptive flexibility is the ability to facilitate problem solving extraordinary solution (Torrance, 1974) 14. The quality of creative flexibility is largely that of being willing to consider a wide variety of approaches to a problem. This, in turn, is largely a matter of attitude. Rather than obstinately freezing onto one particular idea, or a single approach to a problem, the flexible person starts out by remembering that if one solution won't work, he can always approach the problem from another angle Questionnaire Administration and Data Collection Data generation was based upon the questionnaire administration of set of two questionnaires used for measuring latent factors of transformational leadership and creativity. The set of questionnaire was comprised of three parts i.e. A,B & C. Along with guidelines to fill the questionnaire A part was intended to record the personal information like Name, Age, gender, qualification, designation, name of organization, experience, size of Organization etc. Part B contained general information about organization which includes number of employees, turnover of company. Part C comprised of total 50 questions for measuring creativity. Covering letter, which describes the objectives of the research and procedures for completing the questionnaire, Set of questionnaire along with covering letter was sent by post to different organizations from Automobile Industries from all over India. The method for dispatch of questionnaire used was by post, by and by person. Total 169 engineers from automobile organizations participated is this research, of the 500 micro and small size automobile organizations, all of them ware located is India. The employees and freely provide information sacked in the two questionnaires making the analysis more realistic and fruitful.[15] 4. Methodology As mentioned earlier we examine the relationship between flexibility and leadership of Engineers in automobile sector in India. Based on the above research, we decided to test whether there exists a linear relationship of Transformable Leadership with flexibility criteria question. Following null hypothesis has been formulated in this matter

4 558 Pankaj Sharma et al. / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 57 ( 2012 ) H 0 : There is a positive and significant relationship of flexibility (as a measure of creativity) with all four parameters defining transformational leadership of Engineers in automobile sector in India. To test the hypothesis we applied the multiple regression analysis. More specifically we fit a multiple linear regression equation to find the relationship of four predictors of Transformable Leadership with Creative Flexibility based on predictors of Leadership. The output result of SPSS 16.0 for fitting a multiple linear regression equation using Enter method, are as follows: Table 1 : Regression Coefficients with their Statistical Significance Predictors Regression Coefficients(b) t Sig. (Constant) Inspirational Motivation Individual Consideration Table 1 depicts that regression coefficient of creative flexibility on inspirational motivation (0.355) is a significant regression coefficient (p value < 0.05). It means increases in Inspirational Motivation increases the Creative flexibility by the rate of The regression coefficient of creative flexibility on Individual Consideration (-0.218) is a significant regression coefficient (p value < 0.05). It means an increases in Individual Consideration reduces the Creative flexibility by the rate of Table 2 : Analysis of Variance Sum of Squares df Mean Square F Sig. Regression Residual Total Table 2 depicts that for the fitted regression model F-ratio is which is very unlikely to have happened by chance (p<.001). The F-test suggests to reject the null hypothesis or H0. Thus at significance level of 5%, there exists enough evidence to conclude that the slope of population regression line is not zero and, inspirational motivation and Inconsideration are useful as a predictor of creative flexibility. The fitted Multiple Linear Regression Equation is Creative flexibility = (inspirational motivation) (I. Consideration) 5. Conclusion The fitted regression equation concludes that the Creative Flexibility can be estimated by means of multiple linear equation mentioned above on the basis of predictors of Transformational Leadership i.e. Inspirational Motivation and Individual consideration. Two components of TL i.e. Charismatic and Intellectual stimulation were excluded because they were not significant for estimating Creative Flexibility. Thus we can infer that the null hypothesis is accepted and not all parameters of transformational leadership are important in understanding flexibility. Besides this also means that an individual s flexibility in creative approach is influenced by own values and likes/dislikes of other s creative abilities.

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