Transformational Leadership and Employee Creativity in Remote and Hybrid Work Environments: The Mediating Role of Psychological Safety and the Context of Digital Collaboration. : When and how does transformational leadership influences employee creativity in remote and hybrid work environments?

Sammanfattning

Background: Remote and hybrid work arrangements have changed how employees communicate, collaborate, and experience leadership. Although transformational leadership has long been associated with employee creativity, less is known about how this relationship operates within digitally mediated work environments where communication increasingly depends on digital technologies. Existing research also provides limited understanding of the psychological and technological conditions shaping this relationship. Purpose: This study examines how and under what conditions transformational leadership influences employee creativity in remote and hybrid work environments. The study investigates psychological safety and autonomy as mediators and digital collaboration effectiveness as moderator. Method: The study adopts a positivist, deductive, quantitative cross-sectional survey design. Data was collected from 258 employees working in remote and hybrid teams across multiple industries and countries. Regression analysis and Hayes’ PROCESS macro examined direct, mediating, and moderating relationships. Supplementary robustness analyses were conducted using a predominantly remote subsample. Findings: The findings demonstrate that transformational leadership remained positively associated with employee creativity within remote and hybrid work environments. Psychological safety and autonomy partially mediated this relationship, with psychological safety emerging as the stronger explanatory mechanism. Contrary to expectations, digital collaboration effectiveness weakened rather than strengthened the relationship between transformational leadership and employee creativity. Robustness analyses generally supported the findings, although some relationships became weaker under higher levels of virtuality. Conclusion: Transformational leadership supports employee creativity not only through direct leadership influence but also through psychologically supportive and autonomy-enhancing work environments. Leadership within remote and hybrid settings appears to increasingly operate through psychological and motivational mechanisms, highlighting psychological safety, autonomy, and communication quality as important conditions supporting creativity in digitally mediated work environments.