Affective commitment, participative leadership, and employee innovation: A multilevel investigation

Abstract

Research investigating the relationship between organizational affective commitment and employee innovation has yielded scarce and inconsistent findings. This study examined the role of participative leadership in a team as a boundary condition of the effectiveness of organizational affective commitment predicting employee innovation. Data were collected from 343 employees in 34 teams from different Italian companies. The results from hierarchical linear modelling analysis indicated that the relationship between organizational affective commitment and employee innovation was stronger when team-level participative leadership was high. Our findings provide meaningful insights regarding the contextual conditions that strengthen the impact of organizational commitment on workplace innovation.