Participative Leadership and Employee Creativity: Building Psychological Safety in the Modern Workplace

Abstract: Employee creativity has emerged as a critical determinant of organizational competitiveness and resilience in volatile operating environments. This article examines how participative leadership—characterized by shared decision-making, open communication, and employee empowerment—fosters creative performance through the mediating mechanism of psychological safety. Drawing on empirical research from Lebanon and broader organizational behavior scholarship, the analysis reveals that participative leadership directly enhances creativity while simultaneously cultivating psychologically safe climates where employees feel secure proposing novel ideas and challenging conventions. Psychological safety partially mediates this relationship, indicating dual pathways through which inclusive leadership drives innovation. The article synthesizes evidence-based interventions for building participative cultures, analyzes organizational cases spanning multiple industries, and proposes frameworks for sustaining creativity-enabling climates. Findings underscore that leadership effectiveness depends not merely on structural participation mechanisms but fundamentally on nurturing interpersonal safety that liberates employees' creative potential.