Effectiveness of Innovation Leadership Styles: A Manager’s Influence on Ecological Innovation in Construction Projects

This article presents four basic innovation leadership styles: charismatic, instrumental, strategic and interactive innovation leadership. The leadership styles and their characteristics relate to process and product innovations in construction projects. A theoretical framework - which synthesizes these relations enables explorative research into the effects of leadership on organizational innovativeness. Four case studies, observing the same manager in four comparable projects, explore the effects of each leadership style on a construction project’s innovativeness in ecological terms. On an analytical level the case study explorations indicate that a manager’s consistent performance of a leadership style stimulates the project’s ecological innovativeness when the manager also injects the project with ecological information, knowledge and competence. It also indicates that a manager’s consistent performance of a leadership style, without an injection of information, knowledge and competence in the project, doesn’t stimulate the project’s ecological innovativeness.