The Relationship Between Strategic Leadership and Innovation

Innovation is created in organizations through implementation of innovative and new ideas resulted from individual or organizational learning. Organizational innovation thus involves exploratory as well as exploitative innovation. Prior theoretical studies show that explorative and exploitative innovations are related to the quality of strategic leadership in terms of transformational and transactional respectively. This research considers how transformational and transactional leadership behaviors affect two kinds of aforementioned innovations. In this study, data was collected via questionnaires from some Iranian innovative organizations. The data were analyzed and a model was developed. Our results show that transformational leaders may achieve exploratory innovation through developing new knowledge or new products. On the other hand, transactional leaders rely on extension of existing knowledge to accomplish exploitative innovation.