Antecedents of creativity and innovativeness in the Swedish manufacturing pharmaceutical industry

Abstract: The ability to create new products and services is a competitive advantage and in many cases a requirement for long term success of a company. In the manufacturing pharmaceutical industry, the freedom to think and act creatively is depressed by the demand for external and internal compliance. As such, it is important to understand the underlying factors of creativity and innovativeness in order to promote them. Several studies have been performed on the subject to increase creativity. A theme that is recurrent in several creativity increasing studies it that leadership and the leadership style of the management is important for creativity. The purpose of this thesis was to investigate if the leadership style transformational leadership can be associated with a higher level of creativity and innovativeness in the Swedish pharmaceutical industry. Given that the effect of transformational leadership on creativity is likely to be derived from creativity enhancing variables that have been enhanced in the follower’s a literature framework is built to find, and in turn empirically test, if this effect of transformational leadership (if any) is mediated by other variables. The thesis contains a literature review of current leadership and creativity theories as well as literature review of intrinsic motivation and psychological empowering. From the theoretical framework 10 hypothesis´s about performance, transformational leadership, creativity, innovativeness, intrinsic motivation and psychological empowering were stated. The hypothesis’s was tested trough an empirical study. Data was gathered by a questionnaire that was sent out to 22 manufacturing pharmaceutical companies in Sweden. The results of the study support the idea that transformational leadership increases creativity and innovativeness in the investigated market. However, no correlation was found between transformational leadership and intrinsic motivation or psychological empowering. While not the central question of this thesis the study also supports that a higher level of creativity and innovativeness is correlated with a higher performance.