The Relationship Between Ethical Leadership and Innovative Work Behaviour: Role of Appreciative Inquiry

Abstract

Innovative work behaviour forms an important origin for obtaining competitive advantage, and its development gives a commanding challenge being faced by several organizations. In this chapter, the positive impact of ethical leadership at individual and collective levels is proposed to positively impact IWB by employing the theory of decomposed planned behavior. The authors present that appreciative inquiry plays an important role in development of EL, which leads to fairness, power sharing, role clarification, people orientation, integrity, ethical guidance, and concern for sustainability, which strengthens an individual's positive job attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral controls by affecting the underlying behavioral, normative, and control beliefs. In putting forward a holistic and multi-level framework linking EL (at individual and collective levels) with IWB, this chapter contributes to both positive attitudes and EL literatures. At the end, the authors discuss the theoretical and pragmatic implications of the proposed model.