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.