Practices of creative leadership: A qualitative meta-analysis in haute cuisine

Abstract

Creative leadership has been studied in different collaborative contexts that can be summarized as facilitating employees' creativity, directing the realization of the creative vision of a leader and integrating different and diverse creative contributions. In this paper, we present the findings from a qualitative meta-analysis of literature-based accounts of chefs' creative leadership practices from the context of haute cuisine. We bring together both the leader-chefs' and academic authors' understandings of practices available in scholarly papers to achieve a credible picture of creative leadership practices in haute cuisine. We present our findings as a meta-vignette introducing nine prototypical characters representing patterns of practices that leader-chefs perform as they are fostering creativity. We further demonstrate when and how leader-chefs employ practices that are more typical of facilitating and integrating contexts. The nine characters afford an immediate intuitive understanding of the creative leadership practices in haute cuisine, helping scholars to look for and analyse creative leadership and support creative leaders to understand better and be more mindful of their practices.