The Influence of Openness to Experience on Employee Creativity

Abstract

Despite increasing scholarly inquiry about employee creativity, there is a lack of understanding of how individual traits develop or inhibit employee creativity. To narrow this gap, we adopt an interactionist perspective to investigate how individual and contextual factors integrate with each other and influence employee creativity. Drawing upon this perspective, we conceptualize a model proposing that employees' openness to experience affects their radical and incremental creativity under the conditions of supportive supervision and co-worker trust. We test our hypotheses by using survey data from a sample of 199 working professionals in Ireland. Results show that openness to experience positively relates to both radical creativity and incremental creativity. Meanwhile, the relationship between openness to experience and incremental creativity depends on the level of cognition-based trust in the co-worker. We conclude this paper by discussing the theoretical and managerial implications of our findings.