Xiao Chen

Self-serving leadership is a form of unethical leadership behavior that has destructive effect on its targets and the overall organization. Adopting a social cognition perspective, this study expands our knowledge of its adverse effect and the way to mitigate the effect. Integrating two sub-theories of social cognition, we propose a theoretical model wherein self-serving leadership hinders team creativity through psychological safety as well as knowledge hiding, with task interdependence acting as a contextual condition. Results from a sample of 107 R&D teams revealed that self-serving leadership not only reduced team psychological safety, but also induced team knowledge hiding, both of which ultimately affected team creativity. The presence of high task interdependence buffered the destructive effect of self-serving leadership on team creativity via team psychological safety as well as the indirect effect via knowledge hiding.

We live in a world of massive change, and each decade appears to move faster and faster. It is not just the inventions that are picking up speed, but the adoption of technologies is increasing by businesses and consumers. The early adaptors switch to general consumption at an increasing pace. Part of the increase in adoption is attributed to challenges such as a pandemic. Nevertheless, in general, the concepts of a VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) are becoming a standard year-on-year driven by the exponential growth of knowledge and, therefore, technology (Jari & Lauraeus, 2019). As this chapter will explain, this exponential growth in technology would not be possible without the creative surge upon us. Organizations are promoting out-of-the-box thinking and creativity. Historically, creativity was only necessary for the arts and philosophical thinkers. Creativity has moved to its rightful place as part of our problem solving. No discussion of disruption is complete without addressing the work of Harvard professor Dr. Christensen, who for over 20 years has looked in detail at the phenomenon of disruption at the technology and business model levels. Christensen was not just aware of some new technologies’ disruptive nature and provided guidelines on how organizations should view different disruptive technologies (Christensen, 1997; Christensen, 2015; Christensen et al., 2018). Academic institutions and business schools need to embrace creativity and technology as part of the core skill sets required for successful organizations.