USING EFFECTIVE LEADERSHIP TO ENHANCE CREATIVITY

The purpose of this paper is to examine, from an empirical point of view, the relations between leadership and the formation and implementation of a creativity supportive organizational environment. Employee creativity has proven to be, in recent years, extremely important when it comes to organizational efficiency and performance and, also, when it comes to gaining sustainable competitive advantages. Furthermore, employee creativity produces solutions to different organizational problems, solutions that have the ability to transform the organization into a highly innovative one. The goal of this paper is to seek out relevant correlations between different variables related to organizational leadership, especially transformational leadership and organizational creativity. The findings presented in this paper are generated by the answers provided by over 200 questionnaires gathered from companies located in North – Western Romania and contribute to the creation of an organizational model focused on the active support of creativity by revealing a series of characteristics and activities that leaders need to present and perform in order to encourage employee creativity. It is paramount that leaders provide employees with sufficient liberty and maneuvering space so that they can better put into practice their creative abilities and generate innovative solutions, but also it is important for leaders to offer their support and guidance when the situation asks for this. Furthermore, as you will be able to see in this paper, leaders need to create an organizational settlement that will motivate employees to set their own standards and to make constant efforts to surpass these standards, in other words, to become more efficient and to always seek new ways of improving their work. The findings of this paper allow managers and leaders to better understand some elements that influence employee creativity and provide them with the knowledge necessary to implements an organizational environments focused on creativity.