Psychological Safety and Creativity in Teams: A Mediated Moderation Model of Shared Leadership and Team Diversity

The current study extends the literature on psychological safety and team creativity by exploring the questions of whether, how and when psychological safety influences team creativity positively. Specifically, the current study proposes that psychological safety has a positive impact on team creativity and this impact is mediated by shared leadership. Furthermore, the study introduces team diversity as a potential moderator in the relationships between psychological safety and team creativity through shared leadership. It is found that the direct effect of psychological safety on team creativity is more positive when team members perceive high diversity. Using a sample of 135 members working in teams in R&D departments in the electronics industry, the hypotheses were largely supported. Theoretical contributions, practical implications and future research directions are discussed.

Leadership Behaviour in Covid-19 Crisis Response: A Personal Strategy Proposition

This paper analyses the personal strategy driving COVID-19 crisis behaviours of 20 country leaders. It explains the concept of personal strategy and establishes its theoretical basis. It also reviews leaders’ COVID-19 action contexts, actions and associated dynamics to infer the personal strategy driving their behaviour. The article finds the best personal strategy for COVID-19 crisis management as ‘crisis resolution’ and its variants adopted by leaders with a track record in crisis management or facing serious political compulsions—the latter, with a ‘career turnaround’ motive, were focused on erasing unfavourable political image. Leaders following personal strategies of self or negative orientations were the least successful or most unpopular. The article categorizes personal strategies broadly as crisis-focused, negative-focused, ideology-focused and mixed-focused, and it shows that personal goals and personal strategies of country leaders could be interpreted with existing theories. Drawing from a previous study on the same 20 leaders, the article shows that personal strategy of ‘crisis-focus’ is associated with positive styles of crisis action and leader behaviour, ‘negative-focus’ is related to negative action and behavioural styles, and ‘mixed-focus’ is linked to ‘strategic’ actions and transactional behaviour. Except for ideology-focus, leaders’ choice of personal strategy is not found exclusively related to the developmental or geopolitical status of their countries, which proves that personal strategy is a leader phenomenon. Differences in personal strategy among leaders led to different results in different countries—positive orientation resulted in positive outcomes and negative focus caused negative outcomes. The article concludes that personal strategy as a medium of transmitting leader traits into leader behaviour through support of personal goal can fill the gap in the current literature in connecting personal traits to leader behaviour.

Enriching the Construct of Workplace Spirituality with Insights from Indian Philosophy and its Empirical Validation in Indian Context

The purpose of this paper is to proffer an enrichment of the workplace spirituality (WS) construct using tenets of Indian philosophy, and to select and execute an instrument for empirical validation of the construct to assess its cross-regional universality. The literature review was undertaken and the most accepted construct and its accompanying instrument, both developed by Ashmos and Duchon, were identified. The chosen construct was then evaluated and critiqued by leveraging tenets of Samkhya, Yoga and Vedanta, the three most influential Indian philosophies. Subsequently, a survey was conducted on Indian managers working across various industries and regions in India. Factor analysis resulted in validation of cross-geographical universality of the WS construct. However, participants’ responses throw up factors with distinctively contrasting difference vis-à-vis the previous study. A plausible explanation built on the essence of Indian philosophy is attempted, and opportunities for future research are identified.