Inclusive Leadership and Leader Gender Dynamics: Creativity Boom or Creativity Killer?

Banks increasingly rely on employees’ collective creativity to achieve sustainable growth. Drawing on the componential theory of creativity, this study investigates how inclusive leadership influences team creativity through two parallel mediators: team relational energy and team bottom-line mentality. It further examines leader gender as a boundary condition. Multi-source, multi-wave data from 181 teams in Pakistani commercial banks were analyzed at the team level. Results indicate that inclusive leadership elevates creativity by energizing interpersonal connections (relational energy), yet suppresses it when teams become overly fixated on bottom-line outcomes (bottom-line mentality), advancing gender and creativity research in the Pakistani banking sector.