Concept And Emergence Of Innovation Leadership

Overview of Innovation Leadership and Its Importance

Question:

Discuss about the Innovation Leadership for Employment and Education.

Innovation leadership is considered to be a combination of various leadership styles for influencing the employees for the purpose of producing creative products, services as well as ideas (Park, Kim and Krishna 2014). This is considered to be a leadership technique or philosophy. The innovation leader plays the most significant role in this technique of combined leadership. This model was developed by Dr David Gliddon in the year 2006. The main aim of innovation leadership is to develop the organization (Krylov 2014). It helps in achieving the vision and mission of the organization at a fast pace. The organizations need to be creative and adopt the concept of innovation leadership for ensuring continuous success and remain competitive in the market.

This report discusses about the concept of innovation leadership. It gives a brief overview of innovation leadership consisting of three stages. This report describes the concept of value-added innovation as well as exploratory innovation. It discusses the theories that led to the foundation of innovation leadership (Zubair et al. 2015). This report also gives an idea about the various leadership styles that fall under the concept of innovation leadership. It says that the main activities in innovation leadership are generation and evaluation of idea followed by implementation. This report gives an overall idea about the concept and emergence of innovation leadership.

In order to understand the concept of innovation leadership it is very important to understand the concept of innovation (Tripon 2015). Innovation is the generation of unique ideas that lead to the development of viable products that can be used for certain purpose (Liang,  Chang and Hsu 2014). The three main stages that are involved in the process of innovation are:

1. i) Generation of idea: In order to be innovative one must have a unique idea that will help in producing something new and useful.
2. ii) Evaluation: The idea that is generated must be evaluated to find out its effectiveness and feasibility (Raineri and Paillé 2016).

Implementation: After the idea is evaluated, it is implemented based on its feasibility.

There are two main types of innovation. The exploratory innovation is involved in generating new ideas that can be implemented (Benson and Voller 2014). The value added type of innovation is involved in the modification and improvement of existing ideas for overall improvement of the product and services. The ideas generated needs to be useful. Innovation is different from creativity. Creativity only deals with the generation of idea. However, in case of innovation, the idea is put to operation for developing new products and services (Nie et al., 2015). The two main types of innovations are discussed as below:

1. i) Value added innovation: This is a type of innovation where the feature of an existing product is modified or improved. This modification is aimed at creating value. Minimum risk is associated with this type of innovation because it does not aim at creating or developing something new (Hofmans et al. 2015). Transactional leadership is appropriate in case of value added innovation. This is the most suitable leadership in this case because it does not encourage employees to take risk and experiment. However, sometimes value added innovation also might require generation of new ideas. Risk consideration is not involved in this type of innovation process. The leader in this type of innovation needs to be flexible. The leaders need to be able to change the leadership behaviors whenever required.
2. ii) Exploratory Innovation: This is a type of innovation where unique and novel ideas are generated. This type of innovation involves the generation of new strategies as well as solutions for a business. Transformational leadership style is suitable in this type of innovation process (Harrison and Wagner 2016). The main features of this type of innovation are discovery, experimentation followed by risk taking. It is different from the process of value added innovation where existing methods are modified for adding value. This type of innovation has certain requirements like flexibility, adaptability and opportunism so that the leaders are able to give an intellectual simulation to the subordinates. The leaders are able to encourage and motivate the employees so that they are able to be creative and generate new ideas (Cunningham 2014). These leaders motivate the employees to participate in the decision making process so that they are able to discover new ideas and concepts for the betterment of the organization.

Three Stages of Innovation and Types

The foundation of innovation leadership is based on two main theories called path-goal theory and the leader-member exchange theory. Innovation leadership combines multiple styles of leadership for improving the productivity of the organization (Hirano, Ota and Ninomiya 2017). The organizational culture plays an important role in the innovation of ideas. The two main leadership theories are discussed below.

1. i) Path-Goal Theory: This theory advocates various kinds of leadership behaviors like participative and supportive leadership behavior. This theory led to the generation of the idea of a single leader having various leadership behaviors (Zubair et al. 2015). This theory stated that a single leader ca adopt various leadership styles for the betterment of the organization. This will help in the innovative thinking process. An innovation leadership work environment promotes open leadership styles and behaviors. These behaviors can be supportive and upward influence behaviors. These behaviors motivate the employees to be creative and develop ideas in team.
2. ii) Leader-Member Exchange Theory: LMX theory can be considered to be one of the main building blocks of the concept of innovation leadership. This theory says that an organization needs several leadership styles for the purpose of managing various employees and motivating them to produce better. This theory believes that each employee can be tackled by following different leadership styles (Zubair et al. 2015). This theory has played a significant role in the process of innovation. A single leadership style will not be effective in the organization. In order to be competitive in nature, an organization needs to adopt multiple leadership styles. The combination of transformational as well as transactional leadership is effective in forming innovation leadership.

Some of the researches have shown the proof of the culture of organization. This organizational culture or climate is the arbitrator of relation between the organizational innovation and the transformational leadership. This organizational culture is also the arbitrator of relation with the performance (Hirano, Ota and Ninomiya 2017). In simple words, a particular organization should have a strong creative or innovative culture for the transformational leadership to affect the overall innovation of the organization. The term organizational culture mainly refers to the structure of an organization, the expectations of the behavior and the the normative beliefs.

Creativity is the first step for innovation. An innovative person is successful only if he has an innovative mind. The encouragement of creativity is the most important factor in case of innovation leadership. The creativity should be encouraged at every aspect for bringing innovation to the work (Harrison and Wagner 2016). However, this encouragement of creativity is done in all the three levels. The three levels at which creativity is encouraged includes the organizational encouragement, supervisory encouragement and the work group encouragement. All the three levels of encouragement are extremely important.

The first level of encouragement of creativity is the organizational encouragement. This particular type of encouragement involves the main encouragement of risk undertaking and the generation and creation of ideas from all the levels of management (Raineri and Paillé 2016). The three levels of management are the top management, middle management and lower management. The organizational encouragement also involves the evaluation of creative and innovative ideas, the identification of creativity, the reward of creativity, the collaborative flow of ideas through out the organization. All of the above mentioned involvement in organizational encouragement are extremely important aspects (Krylov 2014). However, the third point, which is the identification and the reward of creativity has the most important and recognized impact on the organizational encouragement.

This is the second level of organizational encouragement. The supervisory encouragement mainly focuses on the roles and responsibilities of the project managers and supervisors in the achievement of goals and objectives in a particular organization. Moreover, the overall interaction within the subordinates and the supervisors is also focused or highlighted in this particular level (Krylov 2014). The supervisory support of the work of a team is also highlighted here. This particular level of organizational encouragement points out the basic and the main concepts of the transformational leadership. This type of leadership further emphasizes on the importance of the interactions of subordinates and supervisors in an innovative performance.

Foundation Theories of Innovation Leadership

Work group encouragement is the third level of organizational encouragement. The main feature of this particular level of encouragement is the diversification or diversity in the background of team members (Raineri and Paillé 2016). The innovative ideas normally affect the creativity of the organization as the team members are further exposed to the huge variation of unusual ideas and thus this exposure has drawn to have a positive impact on the creative thinking power.

A successful innovative leader requires various features or characteristics within him. The main attributes or characteristics of a successful leader are as follows:

1. i) Creativity: This is the most important characteristic for any successful innovative leader. If he will not be creative in nature, it is not possible for him to become successful in life (Tripon 2015). Therefore, creativity is the most important feature for an innovative leader.
2. ii) Expertise: This is the second most important characteristic for any successful innovative leader. If an individual will be an expert in his domain, he is bound to become a successful innovative leader in life.

Planning: Planning is the most important step for bringing success in organization. A successful innovative leader always plans everything before taking any step in life.

1. iv) Social Skills: The social skills are the next most important feature for a successful innovative leader (Krylov 2014). The social skills often help to understand the success story of an innovative leader.

There are mainly three types of styles of innovation leadership. These three types of styles of innovation leadership include the transformational leadership, ambidextrous leadership and the transactional leadership (Park, Kim and Krishna 2014). The transformational leadership is the strongest leadership in respect to the other two.

Conclusion

Therefore, from the above discussion it can be concluded that, innovation leadership is considered to be a combination of various leadership styles for influencing the employees for the purpose of producing creative products, services as well as ideas. The innovation leadership is considered to be a leadership technique or philosophy. The innovation leader plays the most significant role in this technique of combined leadership. This model was developed by Dr David Gliddon in the year 2006. The main aim of innovation leadership is to develop the organization. Innovation leadership has helped in achieving the vision and mission of the organization at a fast pace. The organizations need to be creative and adopt the concept of innovation leadership for ensuring continuous success and remain competitive in the market. The above report has discussed about the basic concept of innovation leadership. It has given a brief overview of innovation leadership consisting of three stages. The above report also describes the concept of value-added innovation as well as exploratory innovation. The report further has discussed about the theories that led to the foundation of innovation leadership. The above report also provided an idea about the various leadership styles that fall under the concept of innovation leadership. The report also states that the main activities in innovation leadership are generation and evaluation of idea followed by implementation. The above report has provided an overall idea about the concept and emergence of innovation leadership.

References

Benson, P. and Voller, P., 2014. Autonomy and independence in language learning. Routledge.

Cunningham, S., 2014. Creative labour and its discontents: A reappraisal. Creative work beyond the creative industries: Innovation, employment and education, pp.25-46.

Harrison, S.H. and Wagner, D.T., 2016. Spilling outside the box: The effects of individuals’ creative behaviors at work on time spent with their spouses at home. Academy of Management Journal, 59(3), pp.841-859.

Hirano, E., Ota, K. and Ninomiya, K., 2017. Attitudes toward the Community and Characteristics of Leaders Managing Community-based Preventive Long-term Care Services. Kawasaki journal of medical welfare, 22(2), pp.53-60.

Hofmans, J., Debusscher, J., Dóci, E., Spanouli, A. and De Fruyt, F., 2015. The curvilinear relationship between work pressure and momentary task performance: the role of state and trait core self-evaluations. Frontiers in psychology, 6.

Krylov, S., 2014. Applied Strategic Innovative Analysis as a Research Instrument of the Strategic Innovative Organization Activity Aspects. International Journal, 3(2).

Liang, C., Chang, C.C. and Hsu, Y., 2014. Differential effects of personality traits and environmental predictors on reproductive and creative imagination. The Journal of Creative Behavior, 48(4), pp.237-253.

Nie, Y., Chua, B.L., Yeung, A.S., Ryan, R.M. and Chan, W.Y., 2015. The importance of autonomy support and the mediating role of work motivation for well?being: Testing self?determination theory in a Chinese work organisation. International Journal of Psychology, 50(4), pp.245-255.

Park, S.H., Kim, J.N. and Krishna, A., 2014. Bottom-up building of an innovative organization: Motivating employee intrapreneurship and scouting and their strategic value. Management Communication Quarterly, 28(4), pp.531-560.

Raineri, N. and Paillé, P., 2016. Linking corporate policy and supervisory support with environmental citizenship behaviors: The role of employee environmental beliefs and commitment. Journal of Business Ethics, 137(1), pp.129-148.

Tripon, A., 2015. Requirements on Organizational Encouragement and Resources for the Development of Entrepreneurial Creativity in a Glocal Social–ecological System Case Study. Procedia Economics and Finance, 32, pp.906-913.

Zubair, A., Bashir, M., Abrar, M., Baig, S.A. and Hassan, S.Y., 2015. Employee’s participation in decision making and manager’s encouragement of creativity: The mediating role of climate for creativity and change. Journal of Service Science and Management, 8(03), p.306.