Abstract

Leadership plays an important role in stimulation of creativity among employees and establishment of innovativeenvironment in organizations. Higher education sector of any country acts as a backbone for that country as itprovides skilled human resource. The higher education in Iraq face many challenges, such as brain drain,employee morale and satisfaction that leads to lower innovation. In academic context, the leadership has acritical role in achieving success. The academic leadership of a higher education institution, more specificallytransformational leadership, is responsible for process and product innovation by adopting policies and culturethat would lead to employee’s creativity and institution’s more innovation. Therefore, the main purpose of thestudy is to examine the influence of transformational leadership on process and product innovation in highereducation in Iraq. The quantitative data was collected through survey instrument. The sample for this study isteaching staff in 10 public universities distributed throughout Iraq. The sample consists of 280 academic staffmembers selected through random sampling technique. SPSS was used to analyze the data. The results foundthat there are significant strong relationships between the transformational leadership and the Process innovation.And significant strong relationships between the transformational leadership and the product innovation Moreimportantly, there is significant impact of transformational leadership on both process and product innovation. Inaddition, transformational leadership plays an important role in determining innovation.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.