Introduction: Connecting creative leadership’s strands of research

For several years, research on creative leadership has been dispersed and fragmented across multiple strands or organizational, psychological, and sociological inquiry. Recently, Mainemelis, Kark, and Epitropaki (2015) integrated this scattered body of scientific knowledge into a multi-context model of creative leadership. In this introductory chapter, we present a brief overview of the multi-context model and the three conceptualizations of creative leadership contexts that it entails: Facilitative, Directive, and Integrative. Next, we present a brief overview of the content of each chapter in the volume. Finally, we discuss the contributions that the chapters make to the extant literature, their similarities and differences, and how future research in each of the three contexts may benefit from reflecting on how its assumptions, methods, and approaches differ from those of research conducted in the other two contexts.