Employee Creativity: A Conceptual Framework

Abstract

The literature relevant to creativity is diverse in approach. As a result, there has been a lack of cohesive theoretical understanding of how employee creativity operates and gets affected in organizations. In the existing literature, we found a number of theoretical approaches of creativity that appear as supplementary and complementary to provide a better understanding of the creativity. However, employee creativity continues to appear as an elusive and complex phenomenon. Such observations trigger the authors’ interest to synthesize prior research and present the same in the form of a conceptual framework of employee creativity. On the basis of the results of extensive review of vast and varied literature, it is suggested that three individual characteristics, namely, personality traits & self-concepts, cognitive characteristics and motivational aspects, and four contextual characteristics, namely, super- visory and leadership behaviour, co-workers’ behaviour, job context and social network, have independent as well as combined or mediated effect on employee creativity.

Contribution of Principal Supervision, Principal Leadership, and Work Motivation on Performance of Private Vocational High Schools Teachers in Tanah Bumbu Regency

“…So, it can be said that if the principal has properly supervised each teacher, the competence of the teachers in the school will be better too. Besides, quality supervision is also proven to increase teachers' creativity in carrying out their duties in the teaching and learning process (Jain & Jain, 2016).…”

Proactivity and Employee Creativity: Mediator Roles of Feedback-Seeking Behavior and Moderating Effect of Task Feedback

“…Research has shown a positive relationship between proactivity and creativity (Gong et al, 2012;Jain & Jain, 2017;Jiang & Gu, 2015;Kim & Wang, 2008;Kim et al, 2009). Proactive people actively make constructive changes in their environment, are willing to take a risk to generate new ideas, and reduce risk by gathering the information to anticipate future change and enhance their performance level (Oldham & Cummings, 1996;Jain & Jain, 2017;Gong et al, 2012). However, research has also shown that the relationship between proactivity and creativity tends to be indirect.…”

“…These control variables were included in the analysis because researchers have included them because of their possible association with creativity (Gong et al, 2012). Older employees tend to become less creative (Jain & Jain, 2017). Women were found to be more creative than men.…”

“…The literature has found many factors of employee creativity, and the factors can be divided into two categories: individual and contextual factors. Individual factors comprise the cognitive-related characteristics such as capability for divergent thinking (Jain & Jain, 2017), intrinsic motivation (Chang & Teng,2017), personality dispositions, for example, openness to experience and conscientiousness (George & Zhou, 2001), and proactivity (Gong, Cheung, Wang, & Huang, 2012). Contextual factors comprise socio-environmental variables (trusting work environment, good relationship with co-worker, time), job-characteristic-related variables (feedback, autonomy, job complexity and reward), and leadership styles (supportive and controlling supervisor style) (Oldham & Cumming, 1996;Seibert, Crant, and Kraimer, 1999;Shalley, Zhou, Oldham, 2004).…”

“…Most of the studies have found a positive correlation between proactivity and creativity, but the range of coefficients are small (≤ 0.25) (Costa, Paez, Sanchez, Garaigordobil, & Gondim, 2015). A review paper on the proactivity-creativity relationship encouraged researchers to conduct more research on its underlying processes (Jain & Jain, 2017).…”