If you’ve been following along with the previous blog posts, I’ve been talking about the influence of the artistic mind on the workplace — how art and art practice challenges perspectives; how it has shaped my approach to working with people; how I am becoming my best self by applying my whole self in anything that I do. Looking back on my work as a graduate student, I picked my capstone topic because I was seeing, and personally experiencing a disengagement with a work environment that I so desperately wanted to feel I was a meaningful part of. The following empirical research is a discovery of what type of leadership (behaviors) foster voluntary engagement of team members in driving innovation.

How Transformational Leadership Influences Individuals’ Intrinsic Motivation within Innovative Contexts

By Stefani Quam
Northwestern University, MSLOC
12/10/2018

Abstract

What makes a good leader? has weighed heavy on the minds of scholars and practitioners alike as a key factor in workforce What makes a good leader? has weighed heavy on the minds of scholars and practitioners alike as a key factor in workforce retention. As companies refine their competitive advantage, workers’ ideas continue to become a higher-valued commodity than their skill capacity. As a result, innovative individuals are in high demand. Unlocking innovation, however, requires certain environmental factors be firmly established by the governing leadership. This empirical study screened and interviewed 10 creative-industry professionals for their inherent levels of intrinsic motivation, the primary leadership style that they had experienced, and how that leadership style influenced their innovative engagement with their organization/team. This study found that these three variables could influence one another. Individuals described that they were most engaged in their work when transformational style leaders provided them with opportunities to challenge themselves in new ways (i.e. innovation) and, when they felt their work had the greatest meaningful impact (i.e. intrinsic motivation) for others, both internal and external stakeholders.

Introduction and Methodology

Background

The ability to remain resilient in times of adversity for people and organizations can be strengthened through an openness to using creativity and innovation. Yet these are not always innately exercised characteristics of all organizations or individuals. So what is it in an organization that helps or hinders people from exercising their innovative capabilities? This research explored how a transformational leadership style stimulates intrinsic motivation for innovation within team contexts. More specifically, this study assesses the characteristics of transformational leadership that most prominently resonate with subordinate team members, and how their perception of that leadership influences their own behavioral decision-making. 

Research on the impacts of transformational leadership characteristics to spark innovation is meant to contribute to a more established conversation about how expectations and precedents set by leaders can promote or hinder trust. Trust affects the willingness of individuals to engage in risk-taking behaviors essential to an innovative learning orientation (Dragoni, 2005). Since innovation does not happen in a vacuum, it’s important to understand why and how people build trust to take risks within learning-oriented contexts.

Trust is an essential element for innovation because it fosters a safe learning-oriented environment for testing unknown factors (Anderson & West, 1998; Dragoni, 2005). The willingness to assume additional risk is what enables new ideas to be surfaced, shared, and experimented with. The results of learning-oriented experimentation are the impetus for driving innovative change within organizations (Amabile & Pratt, 2016; Dragoni, 2005).Innovative behavior is defined for the purposes of this investigation as all individual actions directed at the generation, introduction, or application of beneficial novelty at any organizational level (Kleysen & Street, 2001). It has largely been under-studied, particularly in reference to how leadership styles inform characteristics of it. The study of leadership’s impact on organizational levels of innovation has mainly fallen into two categories: organizational effectiveness/performance and organizational creativity (i.e. idea generation), (Shunlong & Weiming, 2012). Yet what is known, is that higher tolerance for risk-taking holds higher propensity for innovative success. Innovation is reliant on organizational groups’ comfortability with, as well as a higher threshold for risk. Therefore, research has an opportunity to inform what characteristics leaders could exercise to increase their team’s risk-taking threshold. The framework for how these concepts are related is illustrated in Framework 1.

Framework 1

Most teams have some type of managerial oversight, governing team member expectations and performance. Research on how managers can influence the behaviors of their teams to drive innovation will contribute to the reframing of what managing really entails, who is equipped to do it, and what successful managing really looks like. Further still, this research helps managers understand how fostering trust, exercises risk-taking skill; a key component to innovative success.

The central question of this research is how does Transformational Leadership influence individuals’ intrinsic motivation within innovative teams? This question hypothesizes that intrinsic motivation is the driving force for engagement when trust and a risk-taking environment are present.

Purpose of this Study

The purpose of this study was to understand how leaders’ actions optimally stimulate employees’ intrinsic motivation. An empirical study was conducted with project team members within creative fields to determine what similar successful characteristics leaders exhibited and strategies they have taken to motivate their employees to innovate.

Research Methods

Participant Screening 

All potential participants were asked to fill out a survey prior to their interview. The initial questions of the survey vetted the participants’ qualifications for the interview; ensuring participants were working professionals in a creative field and had previously or were currently working in a team-oriented environment. The pre-screen survey also helped to identify how intrinsically motivated participants were, independent of their leadership experiences. This initial survey included questions regarding how the participant is motivated, as well as collecting their agreement and availability to participate in the study.

Empirical Study Interview Design

During the study interview, participants were encouraged to recall one or two work experiences as an innovative individual, focusing on what motivated their participation and whether the directions they were provided by their leader influenced their innovation. Ten, 45-60 minute interviews were conducted in total. 

Instrument Design

Each interview consisted of a standardized series of questions, designed to explore related themes across three variables: transformational leadership style, intrinsic motivation, and innovation. These three variables were defined for the purposes of this study according to Table 1.

Variable	Transformational Leadership	Intrinsic Motivation	Innovation
Definition	Refers to an individual’s ability to influence, motivate, and enable others to contribute toward organizational success (Nayar, 2013).	The inner-driven desire to perform a task, interest, challenge, etc. (Amabile & Pratt, 2016; Zhang & Bartol, 2010)	all individual actions directed at the generation, introduction and or application of beneficial novelty at any organizational level (Kleysen & Street, 2001).
Description	Characterized as cultivating an environment of psychological safety, empowerment, and knowledge sharing amongst team members.		Innovation was broken down into five identifiable phases: (Kleysen & Street, 2001) Opportunity Exploration – Looking for, identifying, and gathering information on opportunities Generativity – Generating ideas and solutions, representations and categories, associations and combinations of opportunities  Formative Investigation – Formulating, experimenting, evaluating ideas and solution Championing – Mobilizing resources, persuading and influencing, pushing and negotiating, challenging and risk-taking Application – Implementing, modifying, routinizing

The questions were organized to address each variable individually, while looking for common themes across answers associated with all three variables. Participants were encouraged to give specific narrative examples of the working dynamics of both their team(s) and their relationship with their manager. Participants were also encouraged to provide narrative examples of getting to lead or participate in an innovative initiative. For all narratives, participants were asked to reflect on how their actions and the actions of their managers caused them to feel. All interviews were recorded and transcribed for coding thereafter.

Analysis and Results

Analysis Methods

The methods used to analyze the data collected followed an exploratory approach. Participants were required to be working professionals in a creative field, and that they previously or currently work in a team-oriented environment. The pre-screen utilized the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory assessment to evaluate participants’ intrinsic motivation for innovative work, agnostic of leadership influence. Innovative work was defined according to the following:

Creativity, which we define as the production of novel and useful ideas by an individual or small group of individuals working together, is often conceived of as the “fuzzy front end” (Koen et al., 2002) of innovation, which we define as the successful implementation of creative ideas within an organization (Amabile & Pratt, 2016). Innovative behavior is defined for the purposes of this investigation as all individual actions directed at the generation, introduction and or application of beneficial novelty at any organizational level (Kleysen & Street, 2001).

The instrument was modified by only selecting a portion of the total assessment, called the Activity Perception Questionnaire. Questions were rephrased to allow participants to reflect on their work as a professional practice, rather than reflecting on a specific activity. Modification of the questions in this way accounted for the varying experiences of the participants, who at no point prior to or during this research shared a collective experience. 

The interview questions were structured into three sets, each corresponding with the main variables being assessed. The first set of questions assessed the characteristics of Transformational Leadership that made a meaningful impact on participants as team members. The second set of questions assessed the individual participant’s intrinsic motivation; specifically, what engaged and compelled them to continue their professional pursuits within the context of their workplace. Finally, the last set of questions sought to identify which part of the innovation process people felt they contributed to and where they felt that they had the most to contribute to.

Since intrinsic motivation was pre-screened prior to the interviews for a baseline of participants’ engagement with their work, transcripts were first deconstructed and flagged for examples of psychological safety, empowerment, and knowledge sharing as a means of identifying the existence of transformational leadership as defined by this study within the examples provided. This helped to focus analysis of the data on how transformational leadership qualities impacted the thoughts, decisions, and actions described by the participants of their innovation experiences. Further, this also allowed for analysis of how these variables worked together to manifest transformational leadership, as well as how each variable elicited a response independently from the participant. As a second step, transcripts were coded for examples of innovation phases (see Table 1) to look for patterns in innovative interests.

Results

The pre-screen results measured intrinsic motivation of each respondent according to their perceived interest/enjoyment of their job, value/usefulness of their work, and perceived choice in the work they do. All three categories ranked respondents as 80% to 85% intrinsically motivated for innovative work. Therefore, these respondents did not heavily rely on external motivating factors to engage productively at their jobs.

Intrinsic Motivation

When asked what motivates you when participating in new, innovative projects or initiatives?, the two most frequently identified motivators (50% responses each) were skills in the task domain (e.g. “I do good in my production position because it’s not a glamorous job. But I like it” (P10) ,) and perceived task challenge (e.g. “I love to work under pressure. I love a good deadline. Pressure makes diamonds is what I tell them I’m like. Give me that last piece that nobody can figure out and I will blow your mind” (P5),) There was no overlap between these two groups (for this question). 

Variable	Motivator
Intrinsic Motivation	Skills in the Task Domain
	Willingness to “Think outside the box”
	Creativity Relevant Processes
	Learning Goal Orientation
	Rewards for Effort and Improvement
	Perceived Task Challenge
	Supportive Relationships
	Exchange of Ideas with People of Differing Viewpoints

Perceived task challenge overlapped participants for all three responses coded as willingness to think outside the box (e.g. “I think having no rules is what motivates me. I think that’s the beauty I think in the creative field is that you can try anything you’d like and be curious about the possibilities of what it could be…” (P1),) Supportive Relationships (e.g. “I’m motivated by people oddly enough. And so you know I don’t care what the project is. It’s the people I’m doing it for” (P10),) was the third most prevalent motivator (4 responses), which overlapped twice with skills in the task domain, but none with perceived task challenge or willingness to think outside the box.  An example of this is, 

“So much of it is just like wanting to be a people pleaser, like I love hearing a vision or being inspired and then taking that and being like, What do you want? I’m going to make it the best that I can and then them telling me, OK you change x y and z. And then changing it. Then it’s like a dream. They’re happy and I’m happy. And that’s a huge motivating factor.” (P9)

However, 80% of participants when asked, when do you know that your work is driving the most value to the team? discussed the value of making an emotional impact or evoking a positive response from either a team member or a client (i.e. Supportive Relationships). 70% of participants when asked, how do you know that the work you are doing adds value? also responded by saying that their work had visibly or vocalized meaningful impact to others (Supportive Relationships). Of the responses for Supportive Relationships across the two questions, 80% of participants were also tagged in their responses for sparked an exchange of ideas from differing viewpoints.

Transformational Leadership

Participants’ experiences with Transformational Leadership were evaluated by coding for three categories of behaviors (Table 2).  Answers provided to questions related to psychological safety, knowledge sharing, and empowerment demonstrated the interconnection of these three categories.

Variable	Category	Behavior
Transformational Leadership	Psychological Safety	Encourages Risk-Taking
		Builds Trust
	Knowledge Sharing	Employee Development
		Consistent Behaviors Modeled
	Empowerment	Facilitates Debate
		Achievement Orientation
		Clearly Defined Goals
		Task Support
		Sets Priorities
		Builds Trust

90% of participants described their experiences on teams with strong identity and collaboration as having both identified qualities of psychological safety, risk-taking and building trust. 100% of participants described the importance of trust in their experiences. For example,

“They told you they appreciated you. They told us that we are the work. I mean, without us, nothing would happen. We are what makes this place happen. They told you how valuable you were all the time. They told you when you did really good work. They were just constantly supportive. If you did something bad, they were nice about it. They never made you feel really awful. You never were scared of them. You never had to worry about what they were going to do. They were very consistent. They were very reliable, I mean, they’re very trustworthy. I always trusted them and they trusted us to do our job. They always expressed how much they trusted us to do our job.” (P10)

One interviewee’s story demonstrates a manager building trust by giving team members   the freedom to individually contribute according to their talents. 

“He always had a really amazing way of being able to clearly define what was happening, what needed to happen, where we were going… and then also give freedom to each of us individually to do our portion of it to the best of our abilities.” (P2)

This quote also demonstrates clearly defined goals, a behavior of empowerment. Many of the responses describing trust had recurring themes, such as communication, set expectations, teamwork, goals, and problem solving that alluded to other characteristics of Transformational Leadership, and/or intrinsic motivators. For instance, the most prevalent method of knowledge sharing according to participants was found to be Facilitates Debate, with 80% of participants providing examples of this behavior within their narratives. For example, 

“We did this thing where we each built our own trend packets; like we went through and looked at all like the market and Pinterest anywhere we could find inspiration… and then we came together as a group. We… went through our packets and said like here’s what’s inspiring me. Here is what I’m seeing. And we were being inspired by each other but then taking that and then building one great big trend package. Our manager took all of our things we talked through. Then she built the packet that was like all of us coming together… as one group.” (P9)

 The 50% of participants who were identified as motivated by a perceived task challenge gave examples of their managers facilitating debate. For example, one participant said,

“He asked for feedback more than he gave direction… If he wasn’t quite sure he’d be like how do you think that fits in to a conclusion that we’ve drawn? How do you think that fits in to like narrative b that we’ve heard? and so on. Then you could kind of be like, alright well maybe that doesn’t really fit in with that… He kind of helped guide us places by letting us continue to make all those conclusions together.” (P2)

90% of participants were found to have an achievement orientation when describing a time that they felt empowered by their manager. Another participant’s response showed how knowledge sharing and empowerment work together through employee development and goal setting. They described how their manager took time to understand individual subordinates’ strengths and align those strengths to individual goals for special projects saying, 

“We were all artists doing the same job but she really knew which of us had which strengths and she would give us special projects based on those strengths. She was really good about talking to us about what our goals were and like what we wanted.” (P6)

In all three of these examples, participants shared how these leadership characteristics enhanced altruism, with each team member understanding what they uniquely contributed as well as achieved as a team: 

“Nobody really stepped on each other… there was no ego involved. At the end of the project… he went through and told everybody what they did well and why it mattered to the project. He very specifically picked out what each person did in their contribution. It makes each team member more aware of what value they’re bringing in and what they can continue to bring, and what’s valuable within the scope of a project.” (P2)

“We started just writing stuff down starting by gelling together and just kind of got on the whiteboard and started cutting our weird ideas together into a cohesive single idea. We just worked really well together and that was kind of like riffing off each other and ended up with two concepts and the client liked both.” (P8)

“It was always teamwork. Everyone was as excited as everyone else. It was a very equal amount of participation and enthusiasm and desire to do a good job. And the leadership was the same.” (P10)

One example demonstrated how all three variables can work together. In this instance, a participant was in a middle management position where their own lesson in trust and empowerment from their leadership had to be passed on to their team. This demonstrates behavior modeling, but also the interconnection of employee development and creating a risk-taking environment where failure is part of the learning process.

“I was at a senior level. I had a strong vision for the way things needed to be done in order to let other people grow to that level… So the management at that time said to me I need you to not lead… They needed me to actually step back and let other people make mistakes in order to become leaders… I just didn’t want the mistakes to happen to get there. That’s kind of two sides of the coin. One was go fix it. You were empowered to have strong difficult conversations or to be passive and step back to let other people learn how to move forward even if they’re going to make mistakes.” (P4)

Innovation

Innovation was categorized by five different “phases” or types of related activities (Table 4). Questions asked related to innovation were analyzed holistically for patterns and relationships, to then be compared with results pertaining to Transformational Leadership and Intrinsic Motivation.

Variable	Type / Phase (see Table 1 for definitions)
Innovation	Opportunity Exploration
	Generativity
	Formative Investigation
	Championing
	Application

The participant group that was identified as being motivated to participate in innovation by contributing their skills in the task domain was also identified as contributing to innovation in ways that were unique unto that group. These participants were not identified as engaging in formative investigation (see Table 1) with 0 responses across all related questions. However, 80% of participants identified as motivated by contributing their skills in the task domain identified as engaging in application across all related questions. Application (see Table 1) in its actualization varied depending on the participant’s individual role. Application was described by one participant as “In production, I like that it is a part of the creative process. You know, I’m around creative people working on creative projects but [production] is not subjective. It’s right or wrong. It’s yes or no. It’s, I like that, I don’t like that.” (P10)  For another participant, application was described differently:

“My value in innovation is making sure that the right people are assigned to something. If a challenge comes from a client or a new prospect and I can think about who on the team has the right skills that could be part of a brainstorm or part of a plan building discussion and making sure that we’re putting the right people in place to contribute to something.” (P3)

Reversely, 80% of the participant group that was identified as being motivated by the perceived task challenge had responses in formative investigation and 0 responses across all related questions for application. Formative Investigation showed less variance in its responses. For one participant, formative investigation was described by saying, “I love solving problems. You know that’s to me what being creative is, it’s being a problem solver and creating solutions and thinking different multiple ways that you can kind of get there… together you know, figuring out how the pieces fit and noticing patterns that kind of happen.” (P1) Other participants also described approaching a project in multiple ways:

“I always tell people like, my job here is to go outside the box and your job is to like, real it back until it’s comfortable for everybody. I like doing something different, like seeing things in different ways. I like adding something to a project that seems really obvious upfront and then the more you think about it you’re like oh yeah, this is telling a lot more story than it initially did… depending on what angle you’re looking at it from.” (P2)

“Certain people are more practical and I’m not. I’m more of a like, what’s in my head, big picture and thinking well it doesn’t have to be that way. We can try this where somebody else who’s more practical or realistic might say no. That’s not going to work but you need people on both sides to kind of get things done to keep ideas moving, especially in art. You need people to tell you that something won’t work sometimes. But also like the people that are willing to try new things and want to try new things.” (P7)

Limitations to This Study

This empirical study examines a limiting sample size of individuals working in creative internal and external agency settings located within southeastern Wisconsin. Therefore, results may not generalize across the United States due to differences among workplace cultures, values and practices. Personal demographics such as age, race, gender, and ethnicity, were not considered for participation in this study, but could also contribute to the responses collected and impact future results if the study was to be replicated.

Interpretation and Recommendations

The findings of this study suggest that the varying drivers of intrinsic motivation among individuals could affect the type/phase of innovation they prefer to participate in and what they perceived as contributing value to a project. The significance of this for Transformational Leaders is that different transformational leadership characteristics resonate with greater or lesser significance for individuals based on what their dominant [intrinsic] motivators are and what type of innovation they are being asked to do. 40% of participants were motivated by contributing their technical skills, while another 40% were motivated by contributing their problem-solving skills, and the final 20% of participants showed to be a combination thereof. However, developing trust with team members is an essential component no matter the innovation type, nor the motivations to succeed as a transformational leader. The following recommendations have been organized into three related sub-sets to support this conclusion. No hierarchy or priority exists among them, and the success of any is dependent on the existence of all.

Curating Psychological Climate

Investment in the individual was a key theme among interviewees with examples of trust and respect that were mutual between both parties. These types of interactions are known as leader member exchanges, which cultivate the psychological climate that fosters the willingness for team members to share knowledge and ideas (Dragoni, 2005). Psychological climate contributes to the social learning process (Anderson & West, 1998; Dragoni, 2005); where group members learn the [perceived] valued behaviors of the leader and are subsequently incentivized to act in accordance individually and with one another (Jong & Hartog, 2007; Dragoni, 2005). Psychological climate can be manifested by investing in relationship building, both in individual and in team settings. Relationship building allows the manager and the team member to understand each other’s values, approaches, and learning styles so that they can better communicate and work with one another. 

In addition to individual relationship development, managers can increase rapport and trust at the team level by supporting and defending individual and team work from non-critical critique and commentary. This reinforces consistent expectations regarding the scope, quality, and definition of the ask for the work. This study also recommends keeping the treatment of individuals equal and flat even when structured hierarchically. Shunlong & Weiming (2012) propose that in addition to these characteristics, [transformational] leaders should sacrifice self-interest, operate by their own rules, and role model collaborative behaviors. 

Delivering New and Meaningful Impact

Transformational leaders spur group development through team coaching and self-management, such as recognition and reinforcement of positive task behaviors, setting team accountability (Wageman, 2001). The interviewees in this study consistently spoke of the importance to them of leaders’ acknowledging the value they bring and their appreciation for it as a driving force for their engagement. The positive reinforcement of the impact of their contributions encouraged them to repeat the positive behaviors that lead to such impacts by tapping into their achievement orientation. It is therefore recommended that transformational leaders provide public and private acknowledgement of individual contributions and their value to the team, project, and mission. Beyond personal acknowledgment, it is valuable to collect and share customer and stakeholder feedback, both qualitative responses as well as key business metrics of success to demonstrate impact that the team’s work has beyond itself and its direct management. Setting goals for professional growth at the individual and team level, with regular feedback loops to measure progress also helps to contextualize the responses from the range of stakeholders solicited. This includes setting clear directions and role expectations so members understand their contribution to the whole and feel that they have a part to play in the larger “innovative orchestra”.

Matching Innovative Interests with Opportunities

Transformational Leaders focus on the personal development of each individual team member to their highest potential as the path to optimal group performance (K. Kumako & Asumeng, 2012). Coupled with the finding from this study that there is correlation between an individual’s intrinsic motivators and the type of innovation they gravitate towards, it is recommended that transformational leaders set people up for success by identifying their strengths and delegating work to them that aligns with those strengths. Strength identification comes through relationship building and skills assessment based on individual and team quality output. Further, individual development by transformational leaders is manifested as demonstrations of intellectual stimulation, inspiration, building internal/external group connections, and decision inclusion (K. Kumako & Asumeng, 2012). This can be done by building in development opportunities that give people the opportunity to take risks, rise to the challenge, and make mistakes. 

Coupled with team rapport and trust fostered by the transformational leader, their encouragement of knowledge sharing among team members can lead to greater amounts of collaboration. According to the Principle of Congruence (Ostroff, 1993), intrinsic motivation is strengthened by a match between people, culture, and climate; while a diversity of expertise drives a richer exchange of ideas (McLean, 2005). New ideas and knowledge sharing amongst group members, models new ways of thinking that [can] lead to innovation as new ways of doing things (Bandura, 2005, p.13).

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