How Transformational Leadership Style Weaves Its Influence on Salespersons’ Creative Performance? The Role of Emotional Intelligence and Work Engagement

With the growing competitiveness and innovation-based business environment, employee creative performance has gained critical importance to organizational success. Leadership style is critical in promoting such creativity especially in performance-oriented industry like the pharmaceutical industry. Despite the common research on transformational leadership, scanty empirical research has been conducted to explain the psychological mechanisms through which the concept improves the creative performance of salespeople. In a bid to fill this gap, this research examines the impact of transformational leadership on creative performance of salespeople, and emotional intelligence and work engagement as mediating variables are considered. The chosen research design was a cross-sectional survey. Data from 270 respondents was used for analysis. These data were analyzed using SPSS- 25 and AMOS 22 to test direct and indirect relationships. The findings indicate that employees with emotional intelligence and high engagement in face-to-face selling activities can more easily exhibit creative behaviors. This research also provides insight into the leadership and organizational behavior literature by connecting the Trait Emotional Intelligence Theory with the Self-Determination Theory to describe the psychological mechanisms by which transformational leadership increases the creative performance. In practice, the results can be useful to managers and policymakers in the pharmaceutical industry as they can demonstrate the significance of the transformational leadership practices in fostering employee engagement, emotional competence and creativity.