Super Leadership and Creativity Potential

Research Objectives

The body of the literature on management and leadership primarily concentrate on the vibrant nature of the common organization. This paper augments the abundantly available literature on leadership studies for organizations. The minor intentions of this paper is to generate an forward motion that will induce other academics and scholars to focus on the topic of leadership at a much wider level having more comprehensive objectives in mind. The main focus would be to explore the link between super leadership behavior and creative potential through idea generation for an innovative and creative culture within organization.

Research Questions

The research questions in this case are presented as follows:

1. What is the relationship between super leadership and creativity potential?

2. How super leadership provoke an employee to perform at its best level?

REVIEW OF LITERATURE

Why to shift from traditional leadership to Super-Leadership?

Super-leadership, sometimes also called as “Self-Leadership”, may be defined as the strategy to lead others is hidden in by leading oneself (Manz & Sims, 2001). The main difference between traditional leadership management concept and Super-Leadership is the main focus on followers rather than leader itself, and especially the belief of improving follower’s capacity to lead who are effective self-leaders. Therefore, concisely, super-leadership is the way of leading others to lead themselves.

As argued (Sims & Manz, 1996), for super leadership behavior to be implemented, a leader has to adopt 10 most significant shifts from traditional approach of leadership in order to move towards super leadership approach are as follows:-

1. The leader helps out the team members/group to switch from external observation to self-observation.

2. The focus is on moving from designated goals to goals that are self developed.

3. Organic control is exercised by team/group members’ i.e. external reinforcement for task performance changes in to internal reinforcement with an addition of external reinforcement for self-leadership behaviors.

4. Leadership prefer to motivation techniques not only based on external compensation but also based on the natural rewards associated with work.

5. The leader shifts the group to focus on self criticism rather than external criticism from the organization, which often creates bad impact upon team/group members.

6. There is a move from external problem solving towards self-problem solving techniques.

7. There is a shift from external job assignments to self-job assignments.

8. Leadership moves from external planning to self planning and from external task design to self-design of tasks at step eight.

9. Any problem or issue arises should be treated as an opportunity instead of threat by the group/team members.