The Effects of Personal and Contextual Characteristics on Creativity: Where Should We Go from Here?

Abstract

This article systematically reviews and integrates empirical research that has examined the personal and contextual characteristics that enhance or stifle employee creativity in the workplace. Based on our review, we discuss possible determinants of employee creativity that have received little research attention, describe several areas where substantial challenges and unanswered questions remain, present a number of new research directions for theory building, and identify methodological improvements needed in future studies of creativity in organizations.

When innovation requirements empower individual innovation: the role of job complexity

“…The current findings show that the work environment-individual innovation linkage is driven by a psychological mechanism. This is consistent with theorizing in innovation literature (Amabile, 1983;Shalley et al, 2004;Anderson et al, 2014). More specifically, the relationship between innovation requirements and individual innovation can be explained by psychological empowerment.…”

“…The extent to which this individual innovation is required depends on the job (Farr and Tran, 2008;Shalley et al, 2004). Innovation requirements express the expected degree of individual innovation (Tsui et al, 1997;Wang et al, 2003).…”

“…The participating employees reported gender (1 ¼ female, 0 ¼ male), age, job tenure (in number of years), and managerial level (1 ¼ a managerial level job function, 0 ¼ not a managerial level job function). These variables have also been used as control variables in earlier research on creativity and innovation (Scott and Bruce, 1994;Seibert et al, 2011;Shalley et al, 2004).…”

“…Repeatedly, it has been shown that innovation requirements affect individual innovation (Farr and Tran, 2008;Shalley et al, 2004;Hammond et al, 2011). High-innovation requirements imply a broad orientation on multiple aspects of work (Scott and Bruce, 1994;Yuan and Woodman, 2010).…”

The curvilinear relation between experienced creative time pressure and creativity: Moderating effects of openness to experience and support for creativity.

“…As a consequence, there has been increasing interest in identifying the contextual conditions that influence such creativity (see Shalley, Zhou, & Oldham, 2004). One condition that is frequently mentioned in this literature is the time pressure employees experience at work (see Amabile, 1996).…”