The role of creative leadership in change management

Abstract

The problem that exists today is that it is extremely difficult to assess the influence of a leader on the change management system, since a significant number of his individual character traits or abilities are unknown, which contributes to this. It is important to establish which factors of creativity are more important than others. The key idea of the article is to demonstrate a methodical approach, how to evaluate and select the most effective qualities of creativity in a leader in order to increase the effectiveness of the change management system. The purpose of the article is to determine the level of importance of the factors of the leader’s creativity that influence change management in the organization. The object of the study is the level and structure of the leader’s creativity in the organization. The research methodology includes the method of analytic hierarchy process developed by Thomas L. Saaty, the method of expert review, which was strengthened by the Delphi method. As a result of the empirical analysis involving 40 experts from Ukraine and Poland, four key factors of leadership creativity were identified and ranked by influence: 1) openness to new ideas, 2) risk-taking ability, 3) flexibility of thinking, and 4) social interaction skills. Risk-taking ability emerged as the most influential factor in effective change management. After that, we presented the key directions of how they can be developed. These findings provide actionable recommendations for enhancing leader creativity in practical organizational settings. Rather than offering general advice for similar research, future research should test the applicability of this factor structure across different sectors, organizational sizes, and cultural contexts to validate and refine the proposed model.