Inclusive Leadership with Elements of Transformational Leadership — One of my Favourite Styles

Inclusive leadership is a leadership conduct that involves interactions with employees that exhibit openness, accessibility, and availability, where participation is encouraged and appreciated (Carmeli et al., 2010). It sounds straightforward. In practice, being genuinely open to input that challenges you, being accessible in ways people can predict, and being present in the time you make available, is a discipline. It is one of my favourite styles, and in this article, I explain what makes it a favourite, alongside why I believe it works even better when combined with elements of transformational leadership.

What inclusive leadership delivers

The research on inclusive leadership is repeatedly associated with innovation. Studies have found positive relationships between inclusive leadership and employee involvement in creative work (Carmeli et al., 2010), innovative work behaviour (Javed et al., 2017; Javed et al., 2019; Qi et al., 2019), team innovation (Ye et al., 2019), business model innovation (Fang et al., 2021), and ambidextrous innovation alongside organisational performance (Gong et al., 2021).

Inclusive leadership has also been associated with work engagement (Cenkci et al., 2021), taking-charge behaviour, where employees proactively improve how work gets done (Zeng et al., 2020), and employee well-being (Fang et al., 2021). Ferdman and colleagues (2021) consider inclusion to be fundamental to success in diverse groups, organisations, and society, arguing that inclusive leaders enable access to resources, information, and participation in decision-making.

Understanding the mechanism

How do openness, accessibility, and availability produce innovation? A consistent reason is linked to psychological safety, an individual’s feeling of comfort in taking interpersonal risks without fear of consequences to status, career, or self-image (Carmeli et al., 2010).

Studies have repeatedly found that inclusive leadership is positively correlated with psychological safety (Carmeli et al., 2010; Hirak et al., 2012; Javed et al., 2017; Nembhard & Edmondson, 2006), and that psychological safety supports innovation and learning (Javed et al., 2017). Hirak and colleagues (2012) found that leader inclusiveness supported work unit performance through psychological safety and, notably, through learning from failures. Furthermore, Kark and Carmeli (2019) found a correlation between psychological safety and creative work involvement through a felt sense of vitality; people who feel safe have extra energy available for creating.

Psychological safety is not the only factor mediating inclusive leadership and innovation. Psychological empowerment (Javed et al., 2019), perceived organisational support (Qi et al., 2019), and team voice (Ye et al., 2019) have also been identified as mediators between inclusive leadership and innovation. Considering the multiple factors that connect inclusive leadership to innovation, it seems that inclusive leadership produces conditions, and the conditions generate innovation.

A brief detour through the nervous system

I will keep this brief, because the leadership literature captures the core information. Social threat and unpredictability are key factors that induce stress (Lupien et al., 2007), and research suggests that under sustained stress, humans shift from flexible, cognitively demanding learning toward habitual responses (Vogel et al., 2016).

Consider what this could imply. A team member who fears being dismissed, embarrassed, or penalised for speaking up is, possibly, a team member operating under a level of social threat. If the stress research generalises to the workplace, then an unsafe environment may reduce the flexible thinking that generates ideas and discourage people from sharing opinions.

Where transformational leadership comes in

Here is my reservation about inclusive leadership practised on its own: openness without direction can drift. A leader can be warmly accessible, available, and nevertheless, lead a team that does not know where they are going. Transformational leadership can bridge this gap.

Transformational leadership views leaders as change agents, and most models share four common concepts: develop and communicate a strategic vision, model the vision, encourage experimentation, and build commitment to the vision (McShane et al., 2019). Research has linked a leader’s ability to engage the values and self-concept of followers with the followers’ level of motivation (Sharma & Krishnan, 2005), and leadership vision has been shown to support innovation (Sarros et al., 2011).

There is also an important overlap between the two styles, and it lies in empowerment. Psychological empowerment, the felt sense of meaning, competence, self-determination, and impact in one’s work, has been associated with transformational leadership and job satisfaction (Aydogmus et al., 2018; Fuller et al., 1999), and it also mediates the relationship between inclusive leadership and innovative behaviour (Javed et al., 2019). That is, the two different leadership styles are both linked to benefits acquired from psychological empowerment. To me, this highlights something valuable.

Blending them

Inclusion without vision risks a psychologically safe team that is comfortably going nowhere. Vision without inclusion risks a compelling direction set by a leader who doesn’t hear the input that could improve the direction or highlight its flaws. Inclusive leadership builds the container, and transformational leadership gives it direction.

A transformational leader’s invitation to “experiment” (McShane et al., 2019) is, in practice, hollow without psychological safety, because experimentation means visible failure, and people avoid visible failure when they do not feel safe. Moreover, Hirak and colleagues (2012) found that learning from failure created a path between inclusiveness and performance. Therefore, an inclusive style can support the transformational leader’s invitation to experiment.

Putting it into practice

Ask, then be quiet. Openness is demonstrated. In your next meeting, invite input on something you have not yet decided, and let the silence run longer than is comfortable.

Be predictably available. A door can still be closed. Accessibility means people know when the door is open and can trust it. A leader who protects focus time and breaks, and communicates them clearly, is not being less inclusive. What erodes trust is not knowing when, or whether, a closed door will open.

Respond to the first challenge well. The first time someone publicly disagrees with you; your response sets the direction for everyone watching. So be mindful how you respond.

Connect input to direction. When someone contributes, show them where it sits in the bigger picture. Participation becomes more meaningful when people see their input in the vision.

Publicly treat what is not working as data. If experimentation is genuinely encouraged, an unsuccessful experiment should be discussed with the same seriousness, and the same safety, as a successful one.

Model it upward. If your team watches you stay silent with your leaders, they will learn from this and if you promote inclusivity, they will see inconsistencies between your words and behaviour.

Accessible does not mean continuously interruptible

Accessible and available could be read as an obligation to be continuously interruptible. I do not agree with this view.

A leader who is available for everything is rarely fully present. I have written elsewhere about how fragmented, interruption-heavy work carries costs, to performance, to stress, and over time to cognitive flexibility. Leaders are not exempt from those costs. A depleted, reactive leader is unlikely to bring the openness that inclusion requires. Listening is cognitively demanding, and it requires a leader with capacity to do it.

The resolution is bounded accessibility: protected focus time and dependable breaks for the leader and the team, held alongside windows of availability that people can rely on. Boundaries and inclusion work together fluently when the boundaries are clear, consistent, and applied in both directions. A leader who protects their own deep work while guarding their team’s is modelling something inclusive: that everyone’s attention is worth protecting.

The limits

Inclusive leadership appears to have a paradoxical edge. Zhu and colleagues (2020) found that while psychological safety mediated a positive relationship between inclusive leadership and creativity, reduced challenge-related stress mediated a negative one. In other words, an inclusive leader who removes too much productive challenge may inadvertently stifle creativity. The positive effect outweighed the negative in their study, but the trade-off is still there. Furthermore, one study found a curvilinear relationship, where task performance increased as inclusive leadership moved from low to moderate, and decreased as it moved from moderate to high (Xiaotao et al., 2018).

Most of this research is quantitative, correlational, and drawn from specific populations, often with samples in the low hundreds. How well it generalises to yours or my context, is an open question.

Strip the caveats away, and the core pattern still stands: across settings and studies, leaders who are open, accessible, and available are consistently associated with teams that feel safer, speak up more, and produce more of the idea’s organisations say they want. A clear, well-modelled vision appears to give those ideas somewhere to go.