The Korea Local Administration Review

This study aims to investigate the relationship between empowering leaderbehavior (ELB) and organizational creativity (OC: proactive and expected) withorganizational trust (OT) as a mediator effect through which the study not onlyexamines the effectiveness of ELB on OC, but suggests academic implications andmanagerial insights to management executives of local government. Participants inthe study were 268 public employees serving at public organizations in Kyungnamprovince of Korea, which are subject to relatively strong hierarchical culture.After developing the psychometric properties of the scales of ELB, OC and OTthe reliabilities of which have been verified by Cronbach's α coefficient,hypotheses were tested using a sample of 268 public workers from local governmentorganizations in Korea.Verifying empirically that ELB is expected to contribute to building trust andinstilling a sense of motivation, and enhancing employees’ respect and trusttowards their leader, the study proved that both ELB and OT are significantlycorrelated to proactive and expected OC. Also OT was proved to partiallymediate the effects between ELB and proactive and expected OC each.Conclusively, it is advised to strengthen ELB such as delegating discretionalauthority to the employees, contributing to instilling a true sense of motivationand strengthening employee’s trust which leads to influence significantly proactiveand expected creativity.
□ Keywords: Empowering leader behavior, Organizational trust, Proactive creativity,Expected creativity, Sobel test