The extra mile from extra-role creativity to innovation

Abstract

Creativity is an important resource for companies and social sustainability in organizational development is well advised to include employees’ ideas. While even employees, who are not required to be creative, can develop valuable ideas, there is limited knowledge about ideas that go beyond existing job role expectations. To address this issue, we investigated extra-role creativity, a theoretically assumed creativity dimension aiming to understand its link to innovation taking social facilitating factors into account. We applied a mixed-method approach with two studies: (a) a qualitative interview study with nine employees from a German transport and logistics organization to get in-depth insights and develop a model of extra-role creativity and its connection to innovation, and (b) a questionnaire study with 141 employees from that organization in which we tested quantitatively parts of our previously developed model. Results supported the theoretical assumptions about extra-role creativity. They further highlighted the particular function of employees and leaders as social influences: First, the team's support for innovation facilitated extra-role creativity to be voiced and, second, a leader's support was essential for voiced ideas to get implemented. Limitations and implications are discussed.