TITLE:
Entrepreneurial Leadership as a Driver of Employee Creativity and Innovative Work Behaviour in SMEs in Africa: The Dual Mediating Analysis of Entrepreneurial Intention and Self-Efficacy
AUTHORS:
Cynthia Oduro-Nyarko, Monique Armstrong-Baidoo, Emelia Sarpong, Nicholas Andoh, Clement Mintah, John Lampogo
KEYWORDS:
Entrepreneurial Leadership, Employee Creativity, Innovative Work Behaviour, Entrepreneurial Intention, Self-Efficacy, SMEs
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Business and Management,
Vol.14 No.4,
July
22,
2026
ABSTRACT: This study examines how entrepreneurial leadership enhances employee creativity and innovative work behaviour in African small and medium sized enterprises. It further tests the dual mediating roles of entrepreneurial intention and entrepreneurial self-efficacy in explaining how entrepreneurial leadership translates into innovation related employee outcomes. The study used a quantitative approach and cross-sectional survey design. Data was collected from 388 employees of SMEs operating in Ghana and was analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modelling in SmartPLS version 4.0. The measurement and structural models were assessed through reliability, validity, model fit, explanatory power, predictive relevance, and bootstrapping with 5000 subsamples. The finding revealed that entrepreneurial leadership significantly improves employee creativity, innovative work behaviour, entrepreneurial intention, and entrepreneurial self-efficacy. Entrepreneurial intention significantly predicts employee creativity, while entrepreneurial self-efficacy significantly predicts innovative work behaviour. The mediation results further confirm that entrepreneurial intention partially mediates the relationship between entrepreneurial leadership and employee creativity, whereas entrepreneurial self-efficacy partially mediates the relationship between entrepreneurial leadership and innovative work behaviour. The practical implications are that SME owners and managers should develop entrepreneurial leadership practices that promote opportunity seeking, autonomy, experimentation, and confidence building to strengthen creativity and innovation in resource constrained environments, thereby enhancing innovation capacity in African SMEs to support enterprise resilience, job creation, livelihood improvement, and inclusive economic development. The study contributes to entrepreneurial leadership and innovation literature by modelling entrepreneurial intention and entrepreneurial self-efficacy as complementary mediators linking entrepreneurial leadership to two distinct innovation outcomes in an under researched African SME context.