Individual Creativity during the Ideation Phase of Product Innovation: An Interactional Perspective

Abstract

Although there is increasing acknowledgement that employees' creative ideas are fundamental for product innovation, and many companies use cross‐functional teams to increase employee creativity, there has been little empirical testing of how individual personality and group context interactively affect individual creativity. The purpose of this study is threefold: to examine the relationship between personality and individual creativity; to assess how this relationship interacts with group diversity; and to determine whether the interaction effects between personality traits and gender diversity are mediated by individual knowledge sharing. The results of an experiment based on a sample of 142 working adults show that openness to experience and extraversion are positively related to individual creativity, whereas neuroticism and conscientiousness are negatively related to individual creativity. Furthermore, the impacts of openness to experience and extraversion on individual creativity, respectively, are moderated by both functional diversity and gender diversity. In addition, these interaction effects are mediated by individual knowledge sharing. Interestingly, this study also finds that the direction of functional diversity's moderating effects depends on the level of group diversity.