This paper investigates the effectiveness of creative versus uncreative leadership using EVOC, an agent-based model of cultural evolution. Each iteration, each agent in the artificial society invents a new action, or imitates a neighbor’s action. Only the leader’s actions can be imitated by all other agents, referred to as followers. Two measures of creativity were used: (1) invention-to-imitation ratio, i_Leader, which measures how often an agent invents, and (2) rate of conceptual change, c_Leader, which measures how creative an invention is. High i_Leader increased mean fitness of ideas, but only when creativity of followers was low. High i_Leader was associated with greater diversity of ideas in the early stage of idea generation only. High c_Leader increased mean fitness of ideas in the early stage of idea generation; in the later stage it decreased idea fitness. Reasons for these findings and tentative implications for creative leadership in human society are discussed.