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Introduction
The ability to "generate novel and useful ideas" (Amabile, 1988, p. 126) is considered "the 21st century's most important economic resource" (Agars et al. , 2012, p. 271) because of its relationship to organizational innovation, growth, effectiveness, and even survival (Oldham and Cummings, 1996; Zhou and Shalley, 2003). Research suggests that intrinsic motivation is an important antecedent to creativity as it increases curiosity, cognitive flexibility, and persistence (Amabile, 1996; Shalley et al. , 2004). Organizational leaders can stimulate intrinsic motivation and hence creativity by providing resources and building an environment that encourages job autonomy, goal-setting, and risk-taking (Shalley and Gilson, 2004). A leadership style that resonates with these outcomes is servant leadership. The purpose of this research, therefore, was to explore the relationship between servant leadership and followership creativity (see Figure 1). Specifically, we suggest that workplace spirituality serves as a mediating mechanism through which servant leaders enhance follower creativity. Furthermore, we posit that this relationship is strengthened to the extent that the servant leader possesses the political skill needed to execute their leadership style.
By examining these connections, we make several contributions to the servant leadership literature. First, we empirically examine the relationship between servant leadership and employee creativity. This is important, given that there is insufficient empirical studies using the servant leadership construct, as the "preponderance of servant leader writing has been prescriptive" (Humphreys et al. , 2014, p. 44). Therefore, our study helps to further build empirical support concerning servant leadership. Second, by investigating the combined impact of servant leadership and political skill, we answer calls to expand our knowledge of the core features and outcomes of servant leadership (Avolio et al. , 2009). Third, our research serves as an empirical examination and extension of the Bowen et al. (2010) conceptualization of the impact of politically skilled servant leaders on workplace spirituality. Although Bowen et al. (2010) provided an extensive research agenda, to the best of our knowledge, their model has not been empirically tested. We aim to fill this gap by investigating the relationship between servant leadership, political skill, and workplace spirituality, while also extending research in this area by proffering self-determination theory (SDT) as its theoretical underpinning and demonstrating that spirituality serves as a mediating mechanism between these...