published_or_final_version / Business Administration / Master / Master of Business Administration

Organizational leaders often seek to hire and retain innovative employees as a source of competitive advantage. Both transformational leadership and effectively managed workplace diversity have been theorized and shown to lead to increased employee creative performance at work; however, a full model of the relationships between leadership and the multi-dimensional construct of workplace diversity has not yet been tested. Using a sample of 371 employees in three Chinese high-technology firms matched with 64 supervisors collected at three time points, this study theorized and tested a moderated mediation path model in which transformational leadership and diversity climate were predicted to significantly interact to influence the workplace diversity constructs of organizational justice and organizational identity, which in turn, influence individual creative performance. Based on major theories of leadership, diversity, and creativity, several partial mediation hypotheses are presented, including diversity climate as a mediator of the relationship between transformational leadership and creative performance as well as organizational justice and organizational identity as mediators of the relationship between the interaction of transformational leadership and diversity climate and creative performance. Several single- and multilevel path analyses were conducted to test the model, using two measures of creative performance: self-ratings and supervisor ratings. The results showed that the interaction of transformational leadership and diversity climate significantly predicted self-rated creative performance, and organizational identity significantly predicted supervisor ratings of creative performance. In addition, transformational leadership was found to significantly predict diversity climate and organizational justice was a significant predictor of organizational identity. Finally, transformational leadership had a significant indirect effect on creative performance through diversity climate. The contributions of this study to three major bodies of literature, as well as the implications of the results for research and practice, are discussed.