Promoting employee creativity: The practices of transformational leadership, knowledge sharing, and task conflict behaviour on start-up business in Indonesia

Changes in time and technology cause very rapid development, so it also happens in the business world, especially business start-ups. These developments led leaders to think of preparing a business start-up that was being pioneered in the face of these rapid changes. Employee Creativity is a problem that significantly influences the running of a business start-up. Transformational Leadership is believed to have an extraordinary impact on the development of creativity. Applying the right leadership pattern according to needs will result in better performance, but a supportive work environment will help maximize the role of the leader. This research contributes to completing the research gap of previous studies of Transformational Leadership on Employee Creativity that has different results. The novelty of this research is to combine the concepts of Knowledge Sharing and Task Conflict Behavior as mediations that are believed to be able to optimize the role of a transformational leader resulting in higher employee creativity. The population of this research is the start-up business leaders in Indonesia. The data analysis method used was the Structural Equation Model). The results of this study prove that there is a significant relationship between Transformational Leadership with Employee Creativity and Knowledge Sharing, then Knowledge Sharing has a significant effect on Employee Creativity. At the same time, Transformational Leadership has no significant effect on Task Conflict Behavior, and Task Conflict Behavior does not significantly influence Employee Creativity. Mediation test results show that Knowledge Sharing acts as a mediator between Transformational Leadership and Employee Creativity, while Task Conflict Behavior is not as significant as a mediator.