Explaining how leadership and justice influence employee innovative behaviours

Purpose The mechanisms through which leaders influence innovative work behaviours (IWB) are important in innovation management. The purpose of this paper is to explain how leadership and justice relate to IWB through the successive mediating roles of affective commitment and organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB). Design/methodology/approach The study is based on survey of a random sample of 300 employees selected from 652 employees from a public university, and a convenience sample of 159 employees from predominantly service-based enterprises in Lesotho ( n =263). The Statistical Package for Social Sciences and the analysis of moment structures version 24 are used to analyse data. Specifically, the study uses factor analysis; correlation; structural equation modelling and bootstrapping techniques to examine the hypothesised relationships. Findings The results suggest that the model that fits data well is the one which shows that the effects of both leadership and organisational justice on IWBs are successively mediated by affective commitment and OCB. Because of its social and affiliation-oriented nature, the study submits that OCB is an effective explanatory factor between predictors and IWBs. Originality/value The study makes a novel contribution to the extant literature by evaluating the serial mediating roles of affective commitment and OCB between leadership and IWB on one hand, and justice and IWB on the other hand.