Impact of Servant Leadership on Team Innovation Performance in Digital Transformation Context: The Mediating Role of Team Knowledge Dynamic Capabilities
Digital transformation has intensified the need for organizations to cultivate team-level innovation capabilities, yet traditional leadership approaches demonstrate limited effectiveness in fostering collective innovation within technology-rich environments. This research examines how Servant Leadership (SL), characterized by leader prioritization of follower development and empowerment, influences team innovation performance through Team Knowledge Dynamic Capability (KDC) mechanisms in digitalized organizational contexts. Adopting a multilevel time-lagged research design, this study collected data from 78 knowledge-intensive teams comprising 426 employees across three waves spanning six months in major Chinese economic regions. Multilevel structural equation modeling revealed that SL exerted both direct and indirect effects on team innovation performance, with the indirect effect through team KDC reaching β =0.23 (95% CI [0.15, 0.31], p<0.001). The validated model accounted for 52% of variance in team innovation performance and 38% of variance in team KDC. Organizational digital ransformation level significantly moderated the SL-team KDC relationship, with the effect substantially stronger in high digitalization contexts (simple slope=0.62, p<0.001) compared to low digitalization environments (simple slope=0.28, p<0.05). Robustness tests including bootstrap analyses, alternative model comparisons, and multigroup analyses confirmed result stability across industry sectors and organizational sizes. These findings advance theoretical understanding by integrating servant leadership with dynamic capability perspectives and demonstrating that service-oriented leadership constitutes a microfoundation for collective innovation capabilities. Practically, organizations navigating digital transformation should prioritize servant leadership development and align leadership practices with digital affordances to enhance team knowledge processes and innovation outcomes.
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