The Impact of CEOs’ Transformational Leadership on Sustainable Organizational Innovation in SMEs: A Three-Wave Mediating Role of Organizational Learning and Psychological Empowerment

Saira Begum, Enjun Xia, Khalid Mehmood, Yaser Iftikhar and Yan Li
Additional contact information
Saira Begum: School of Management and Economics, Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT), Beijing 100081, China
Enjun Xia: School of Management and Economics, Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT), Beijing 100081, China
Khalid Mehmood: School of Economics and Management, Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, China
Yaser Iftikhar: Department of Business Administration, University of Sahiwal, Sahiwal 57000, Pakistan
Yan Li: School of Management and Economics, Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT), Beijing 100081, China

Sustainability, 2020, vol. 12, issue 20, 1-16

Abstract: The sustainable organizational innovation is of paramount importance for enhancing productivity in firms and provides organizations with the strategic direction needed to allow them to perform at an international level. The leadership styles play a key role in their firms’ potential to consistently innovate. Using data from a time-lagged design with three waves, CEOs of Chinese small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) participated in the study. The findings reveal that psychological empowerment mediated the relationship between transformational leadership and sustainable organizational innovation. Organizational learning was found to indirectly effect the relationship between transformational leadership and sustainable organizational innovation. It also demonstrated that psychological empowerment had a positive impact on organizational learning. The findings indicate the strategic significance of transformational leadership and its influence on sustainable organizational innovation for SMEs. Theoretical contributions and practical implications were also discussed.

Keywords: transformational leadership; small and medium-sized enterprises; psychological empowerment; organizational learning; sustainable organizational innovation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/20/8620/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/20/8620/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:12:y:2020:i:20:p:8620-:d:430670

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().