Responsible innovation in organisations – unpacking the effects of leader trustworthiness and organizational culture on employee creativity

Ongoing changes in competitiveness and advancements in technology are challenging the ability of manufacturing firms to bring about responsible innovation in emerging economies. A crucial response to this situation involves supporting employee creativity as a strategy suited to foster responsible innovation. Prior research has established a positive correlation between employee creativity and responsible innovation. However, when attempting to promote employee creativity, firms are often faced with challenges to their organizational culture (OC), especially in the presence of limited employee trust in their leaders. Although, extant research has suggested a positive correlation between leader trustworthiness and employee creativity, little is known of the stability of such relationship under diverse OCs. Also, previous research on the correlation between OC and employee creativity has yielded conflicting findings, thus failing to contribute to the knowledge of how organisations may further engage in responsible innovation. Consequently, we investigated the influence of diverse OCs on employee creativity, and how leader trustworthiness affects the relationship between them. To do so, we undertook a quantitative analysis of a coded cross-sectional survey involving 222 participants from 54 manufacturing organizations in Malaysia. The survey data were evaluated through partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM). An importance-performance map analysis shows that clan OC has the strongest positive correlation with employee creativity and exerts the highest level of importance to it. Surprisingly, leader trustworthiness was found to decrease employee creativity and to strengthen the positive relationships of market and hierarchical OC with employee creativity. Our study offers novel insights into how diverse OCs and leader trustworthiness impact employee creativity in an emerging economy context.