Nurturing employee innovativeness and work engagement: how inclusive leaders cultivate psychological safety among information technology (IT) professionals

In the current competitive business landscape, organizations, especially in the information technology (IT) industry, pursue greater levels of internal innovation from their employees. Grounded in the social exchange theory, this study examines how inclusive leadership style, through cultivating psychological safety within the organization, results in employee motivations towards expressing innovative work behavior and higher work engagement. To understand the dynamics, survey responses were collected from 263 IT service professionals through a self-administered questionnaire, and the relationship among the latent constructs was analyzed using SmartPLS 4.0. This study concludes significant positive impacts of inclusive leaders on employee work engagement and innovative work behavior. Besides, inclusive leaders have a strong positive impact on employees' feeling of psychological safety to exhibit personal opinions, which stimulates greater levels of innovation and engagement within the organization. Furthermore, study finding draws managers' attention by proposing a critical role of employee age that negatively moderates the psychological safety-work engagement link. This research confirms the leader-follower exchange relationships among IT professionals and recommends the managers to adopt inclusive leadership style along with a safer environment for employees’ expression, which in turn fosters greater innovative ideas and practices.