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Introduction
Innovation is a vital source of organizational prosperity, competitive advantage and sustainable success in current dynamic and hyper-competitive business environment (Hughes et al., 2018; Newman et al., 2018; Amankwaa et al., 2019). Existing research maintains that employees' innovative behaviour, referred to as generation and implementation of new and valuable ideas (Scot and Bruce, 1994), is instrumental to organizational innovation. Therefore, it is important to understand the antecedents and mechanisms influencing employees' innovative behaviour (Cai et al., 2018). A plethora of research has widely recognized the role of managers' leadership style in encouraging employees' creative and innovative behaviours (e.g. Afsar et al., 2014; De Jong and Den Hartog, 2007; Xu et al., 2017).
Servant leadership (Greenleaf, 1970) is a people-oriented leadership behaviour that emphasizes interests and needs of the followers rather than their own (Liden et al., 2015). Moreover, servant leadership is a holistic leadership approach (Eva et al., 2019) which differs from other forms of leadership in terms of its characteristics such as authenticity, humility and interpersonal acceptance (Van Dierendonck, 2011). Recent meta-analytic examinations also suggest that as compared to other forms of leadership (e.g. transformational, ethical and authentic leadership), servant leadership has better predictive validity for a broad range of individual outcomes (Hoch et al., 2018).
Based on its people-centric approach and prominent characteristics such as empowering followers and focusing on their growth and development, servant leadership can prompt their followers to engage in creative activities (Liden et al., 2014). Therefore, it is only recently that shcolars have begun to investigate the impact of servant leadership on followers' innovative behaviour (e.g. Cai et al., 2018; Newman et al., 2018; Zhu and Zhang, 2019). However, due to the fragmented nature of prior studies and their inconsistent findings, scholars have underscored the need for in-depth investigation of relationship between servant leadership and employee innovative behaviour and the underlying mechanisms for better understanding of the nature of this relationship (Eva et al., 2019; Hughes et al., 2018; Newman et al., 2018).
Additionally, the social exchange theory (SET) (Blau, 1964), which is based on the norms of reciprocity (Gouldner, 1960), is the prominent theoretical lens that has been frequently invoked in extant...