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Leadership is a versatile process which includes all the steps from identifying a specific goal to motivating and supporting the employees’/team members to achieve that goal (Chen, 2020). It is a soft skill which does not teach what to think but definitely enlighten how to think in a specific situation (Anning, 2018). During the last fifteen years, a number of theories regarding leadership have been emerged including charismatic, transformational, visionary and inspirational, which focused on the exceptional abilities of the leader (Bednall et al., 2018). According to the study of Laguna (2019), there is no single leadership style that can be claimed as best suited for all the situations; the success of a leader depends upon the ability to adapt a leadership style according to the requirement of the time.
Leadership style matters a lot in managing a project and can result in increased output and sustainability (Zaech, 2017). An effective style of leadership is required for projects because the limited- time nature and diverse team members makes them less committed and interested, hence giving rise to mismanagement, conflict and miscommunication (Xie, 2018). Leadership in projects is a combination of management and leadership, where as a leader, achieving objectives is the focus and as a leader, influencing, guiding and directing are the emphasis (Leitch, 2013).
It is important to have a strategic advantage (difficult for competitors to copy) for the long-term sustainability of the firms, which can be accomplished with a creative approach to supposed (Tlaiss, 2019). Many have agreed that Entrepreneurial Leadership (EL) is of considerable value for dominant firms (Paudel, 2018). On the word of Kim (2017) and Bagheri (2018), EL creates unique goals for the organizations that are innovative and creative and endorse a sense of risk taking.
In the present age of innovation, there is an increasing demand of the innovative work in the behaviors of the team members and creativity (Pradhan, 2019). Thus leaders need to know ways of producing innovative work behavior (IWB) at individual level, no doubt the collective move will attain the novelty and creativity in the projects that may consequently gain the attraction and satisfaction of customers as well as move a step ahead of the competitors (Javed et al., 2017).
This research aims to explain Social Cognitive Theory (SCT), the process by which EL influence the IWB of employees (Mokhber et al., 2016; Afsar, 2017). This theory has established the connection among individual features, behavioral factors and environmental factors (Ng, 2016). According to SCT, employees with a high degree of self-efficacy perform riskier and tougher tasks than persons with low self-efficacy who views the problem as unpredictable and risky (Jaiswal, 2015). Hmieleski (2008) has shown that self-efficacy, in particular Entrepreneurial Self-Efficacy (ESE), improves IWB and creativity for workers (Newman, 2019). As the researchers studied leadership literature, they found that leadership practices begin in the business world and investigated a bivariate correlation that this will be insufficient without recognizing the corporate context in which organizational creativity is concerned (Tabassi et al., 2016). It is therefore important to recognize and analyze factors that can influence organizational innovation with leadership behaviors (Bani, 2018). Drawing from the previous literature, (Newman, 2019) verifies that ESE may improve the association of Entrepreneurial Leaders and IWB. Additionally, the prior studies show little attention in exploring the moderating role of ESE (Chen, 2017), this study would be insightful in exploring the impact of EL on IEB and taking ESE as moderating variable and that eventually extending the current knowledge gap. Based on the rational and justification, from the studies of Pradhan, (2019), Nasifoglu et al., (2020), and Yang et al., (2019), the present study thus, designed to examine the role of EL on CIP with a mediated-moderation effect of ESE and IWB, so the roles of the predictor variables may stimulate and encourage creativity in highly complex and competitive manners.