Uncovering the effect of responsible leadership on employee creative behaviour: from the perspective of knowledge-based pathway

Purpose The study aims to explore ‘motivational climate', which designs the recurring patterns associated with employees' attitudes, behaviour, and feelings. If organizations successfully adopt a motivational climate, such climate influences the performance and behavior of employees to a great extent. Responsible leadership plays a constructive role in injecting a motivational climate in an organization to ensure information flow. In a motivational climate, top management or leaders reward their employees for individual progress, improvement and mastery. Knowledge sharing is supported in a mastery climate because such a climate can reduce the motive of knowledge hiding and instead further help in stimulating creativity. Design/methodology/approach Study was to scrutinize a moderated-mediation model, a quantitative hypothetic deductive approach to verify the hypotheses of the study. The data were gathered from employees and supervisors of advertising agencies and marketing departments in metropolitan cities of Punjab, Pakistan. Such firms and departments are considered because they offer a great opportunity to relevant variables and their relations. These organizations and departments are the most creativity-seeking domains and involve frequent interactions (for instance, regular meetings) between leaders with their employees and among peers. Data were primarily gathered from managerial employees performing their duties in the areas mentioned above. Findings Current study reveals that RL has a positive and significant relation with employee creative behaviour. Increasing RL characteristics can ultimately boost employee performance in the creativity domain. Being a responsible leader becomes mandatory for leaders to foster employee creativity to maintain the sustainability of an organization. It is confirmed from the results that responsible leadership articulates the mind thinking of employees, which creates an open environment of information while persuading creative and similar behaviour. Originality/value The current research investigates how responsible leadership can efficiently leverage the stakeholder approach in influencing employees through a knowledge-based pathway to boost their creative behaviour. The current study tends to uncover the mediating effect of the basic construct of knowledge management, which is knowledge sharing. Knowledge sharing enables employees to exchange their information while creating mutual understanding, which helps in the smooth flow of knowledge within the organization; this flow enriches employees to think openly in a creative and appreciative environment.