THE LEADERSHIP SUPPORT IN PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY AND INNOVATIVE WORK BEHAVIOR IN ORGANIZATIONS

Abstract

The current research examined the links between leadership support, psychological safety, and innovative work behavior with the Pakistani organizations with special emphasis on the mediating effects of psychological safety. It was a cross-sectional survey of 620 workers in different areas of work, including the banking industry, education, telecommunications, healthcare, and the government. The measures of leadership support, psychological safety, and innovative work behavior were measured using standardized measures and the data analyzed with descriptive statistics, correlation, multiple regression, and mediation analyses. The findings showed that the support of leadership was a positive predictor of psychological safety (0.58, p <.001) and innovative work behavior (0.29 p <.001). Another factor that became a major predictor of innovative work behavior (= -.38, p = -.001) was psychological safety which to some degree mediated the linkage between leadership support and innovative work behavior, which suggests that leaders not only facilitated innovation but also did it by providing a safe and supportive work environment. These results highlight the need to have supportive leadership and psychologically safe climates to facilitate innovation, especially across hierarchical and collectivist organizational cultures like those found in Pakistan. The research also contributes to theory, as it confirms the mediating role of psychological safety in a non-Western culture, and to practice as it puts the organizational policies and the efforts to support leadership development and encourage employee creativity and innovativeness.