How Korean Leadership Style Cultivates Employees’ Creativity and Voice in Hierarchical Organizations

Abstract

This article examines how Korean leaders in a hierarchical society would trigger employees’ creativity and voice behavior through an indigenous leadership style: Korean leadership style (KLS). KLS exhibits heavily relationship-oriented behaviors, including attending to superiors’ needs and requests, building a positive reputation and trust of peers, and embracing and sheltering subordinates. Jeong, a shared group affect ingrained in Korean society, and woori, a shared feeling of belongingness dedifferentiating individuals constituting the collective, provide a fertile ground for this unique leadership style. Building upon the literature on group affect and collective energy, we explore how the affective mechanism mediates the positive relationships between KLS and employees’ creativity and voice behaviors. The findings from the empirical study of 340 leader–follower paired data points confirm the positive relationships between relationship-oriented Korean leader behaviors and employees’ creativity and voice behavior and that, for creativity, the link is partially mediated by positive affect with high energy.