Exploitative leadership and employees' creativity: An analysis of the mediating role of organizational cynicism

Context:

 In today's era, it has become clear to everyone that the existence of creative and motivated human resources is one of the reasons for the economic leadership of organizations and their not falling behind in the field of competition. Meanwhile, various factors affect the creativity of employees, which include exploitative leadership and organizational cynicism.

The purpose of this research was to examine the relationship between exploitative leadership and employees' creativity with the mediating role of organizational cynicism in Lorestan University.Research

The present descriptive-exploratory research is applied in terms of purpose and is based on the deductive research and positivism paradigm in term of philosophy. The statistical population of the study was 440 employees of Lorestan University. Based on Morgan's table, a sample of 205 people was selected by stratified random sampling. In order to measure the variables of the research, the (Schmid et al’s, 2019) exploative leadership Questionnaire, (Wang et al’s, 2013), creativity Questionnaire and the (Dean et al’s, 1998) organizational cynicism Questionnaire were used and Their reliability was confirmed by Cronbach's alpha. For data analysis, structural equations modeling and PLS software have been used.

Findings show that exploative leadership has a negative and significant relationship with employees' creativity and a positive and significant relationship with organizational cynicism, organizational cynicism has a negative and significant relationship with employees' creativity, also exploative leadership has a significant negative relationship with employees' creativity through organizational cynicism.

Exploitative leaders who, with all their selfishness, are highly focused on achieving their personal goals and do not spare any effort in this direction, have caused dissatisfaction and a feeling of organizational cynicism in employees, which causes negative thoughts towards The organization and the feeling of frustration and discouragement among the employees will increase, as a result of which their creativity will decrease.