"Feeling inspired, being creative: Inspiration as a mechanism to fuel employee creativity"

Abstract

Organizations’ ability to innovate depends on their capacity to stimulate and use the creativity of their employees. Notwithstanding this importance, the processes that promote creativity among ordinary employees are not well-understood. In this paper, we investigate the role of inspiration as a process that allows employees to creatively express the insights they gain from their social work environment. We argue that the perceived cognitive diversity of an employee’s coworkers constitutes an important potential source of inspiration and in turn workplace creativity. Building on the insight that realizing this benefit requires actors to be attuned to their social environment, we propose that employees who feel relatively powerless may derive higher levels of inspiration from a work environment they perceive as cognitively diverse. Multi-source data collected across three time points from a large sample of employees and their supervisors supports the contingent benefits of a cognitively diverse work environment for inspiration and indirectly creativity for employees feeling powerless. At the same time, our findings also highlight the inhibiting role of experienced powerlessness when it comes to translating this inspiration into implemented ideas and practices. Taken together, these findings offer important theoretical and practical implications.