Employee incremental and radical creativity: Differential antecedents, psychological mechanisms, and boundary conditions

Ye Liu

Research output: ThesisThesis fully internal (DIV)

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Abstract

Employee creativity provides the raw materials or ingredients for organizations to remain flexible and to successfully adjust to shifting markets, competition, and technological developments. Employees exhibit creativity when they come up with novel and potentially useful ideas concerning products, services, processes, and procedures. Inherent in this definition is that creativity can range from incremental adaptations to existing thoughts and practices to radical breakthroughs that deviate substantially from the status quo. Although the conceptual distinction between incremental and radical creativity has been made before, the vast majority of empirical research has defined and measured employee creativity as a unitary construct. In this dissertation, we conducted three empirical field studies to examine why, when, and how creative role expectations, empowering leadership, and interdependent and independent self-construals may have differential relationships with employee incremental and radical creativity. Our findings suggest that, compared with incremental creativity, radical creativity requires a higher cognitive threshold (i.e., creative cognitive style), more far-reaching generation processes (i.e., self-efficacy for creativity), and relatively independent behavioral strategies in the creative process. As such, we provide solid empirical evidence for the conceptual distinction between incremental and radical creativity and advance our understanding of differential antecedents, process mechanisms, and boundary conditions underlying these two forms of creativity.
Original languageEnglish
QualificationDoctor of Philosophy
Awarding Institution
  • University of Groningen
Supervisors/Advisors
  • Janssen, Onne, Supervisor
  • Vriend, Tim, Co-supervisor
Award date28-Jan-2019
Place of Publication[Groningen]
Publisher
Print ISBNs978-94-034-1193-4
Electronic ISBNs978-94-034-1192-7
Publication statusPublished - 2019

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