Do schools have hindrance of quality to promote innovativeness? Examining the role of empowering leadership and stakeholder involvement

Purpose Schools provide high priorities to offer innovative curricular and cocurricular programs, and leaders make necessary efforts to promote enablers and overcome disablers for sustaining their innovativeness. With the background of quality management and stakeholder theories, the present study examines the interplay of hindrances to quality between empowering leadership, stakeholder involvement and organizational innovativeness. Design/methodology/approach Responses of 157 American school principals collected through the Teaching and Learning International Survey 2018 by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development were used and analyzed to test the proposed hypotheses. Findings Results show that empowering leadership behaviors of school principals support promoting organizational innovativeness, and involvement of stakeholders with the school activities also promotes organizational innovativeness. Interestingly, when American schools faced a high level of hindrance to providing quality education to their students, principals’ high level of empowering leadership behaviors promoted organizational innovativeness. Originality/value This is the first time in the literature that the interplay between empowering leadership, stakeholder involvement and hindrance of quality education has been examined to promote organizational innovativeness.