The role of openness to experience in innovating teaching and instruction through leader-member exchange and teacher creativity

Despite a multitude of studies in organizational behavior research invested in understanding the interrelationship among personality traits, leader-member relationship (LMX), creativity, and innovative behaviors over the past decades, these concepts have not attracted much attention in education. The present research concerned how innovative teaching can be enhanced through teacher openness to experience, creativity and LMX. More specifically, we examined the relationship between teacher openness to experience and teachers' implementation of innovative teaching ideas through mediating and moderating roles of LMX and teacher creativity. Employing a stratified sampling strategy, the data was collected from 3016 teachers nested within 148 schools across different regions in Malaysia. A latent moderated mediation analysis was utilized to test ten hypotheses. Results showed that teachers’ openness to experience was a significant predictor of their creativity, the quality of their relationship with the school leader (LMX) and innovative teaching practices. A significant and indirect relationship between openness and the implementations of innovations in the classroom was also evident through the mediating roles of creativity and LMX. However, we found no evidence for the moderating role of LMX and creativity in the effect of both openness and creativity on the implementation of innovations. We conclude that creating space for teachers that support willingness for new experiences could help establishing better relationships with principals, which together could enhance the development and implementation of creative ideas in classrooms that might address issues with and enhance student learning.