The Relationship Between Leadership Style and Employee Perceptions of Organizational Appreciation of Creativity and Innovation

Abstract

This study assessed the relationship between the transactional and transformational leadership style behaviors of federal bank regulators and employee perceptions of organizational appreciation of creativity and innovation. To investigate this relationship, this explanatory study utilized all 2,876 records in the 2019 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) results from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, one of the four U.S. prudential federal bank regulators. Hierarchical regression was utilized to analyze the FEVS data, and results indicate that both transactional and transformational leadership have a positive impact on U.S. federal bank regulator employee perceptions of organizational appreciation of creativity and innovation. Furthermore, study results suggest that transactional leadership behaviors trump transformational behaviors when it comes to positively impacting U.S. federal bank regulator employee perceptions of organizational appreciation of creativity and innovation. These findings are significant in that they deliver ground-breaking information on the existence of relationships between specific leadership style behaviors and U.S. federal employee perceptions of organizational appreciation of creativity and innovation. Furthermore, this work adds to the overall body of knowledge on the connection between leadership style and U.S. federal employee perceptions of their respective organizations. However, it also contributes an entirely new area of research, as the relationship between transactional and transformational leadership behaviors and U.S. federal employee perceptions of organizational appreciation of creativity and innovations simply has not been investigated previously. This study also delivers a quantitative, repeatable analysis approach that can be applied to broader federal agency efforts to understand links between transactional and transformational leadership behaviors and other employee perceptions captured in the FEVS.