Participative leadership and team creativity: the role of team intellectual capital and colleague social support

While previous research has explored participative leadership’s impact on creativity through various mechanisms, they have largely overlooked the role of knowledge. Drawing on the input-process-output (IPO) framework, this study proposes that team intellectual capital (TIC) is a novel key knowledge mechanism explaining the relationship between participative leadership and team creativity. Moreover, the relationship between participative leadership and TIC is moderated by colleague social support, i.e. when the levels of colleague social support is high, the relationship is greater (vs. lower). Data was collected using supervisor-subordinate paired questionnaires with a multi-source, three-wave time-lagged approach, resulting in a final sample of 735 employees and their 150 supervisors from 150 teams in China. Data analysis was conducted using path analysis in Mplus 8.3, and the results strongly supported the hypothesized relationships. Overall, this study deepens the understanding of how participative leadership influences team creativity from the perspective of knowledge (TIC), which is crucial for organizations to gain a competitive advantage.