رابطه عملکرد – خلاقیت: چگونه پاداش دهی موجب بروز خلاقیت می شود THE CREATIVITY-PERFORMANCE RELATIONSHIP: HOW REWARDING CREATIVITY MODERATES THE EXPRESSION OF CREATIVITY

EXPRESSION OF CREATIVITY CHRISTINA SUE-CHAN AND PAUL S. HEMPEL Researchers have argued that creativity is intrinsically motivated, and that rewarding creativity can stifl e creativity. Using a sample of 310 employees reporting to 50 different supervisors, we instead show that rewarding creativity infl uences the relationship between creativity and performance by changing the nature of expressed creativity. We do this by examining novelty and usefulness as separate dimensions. High perceived reward enhances the relationship between novelty and performance while diminishing the relationship between usefulness and performance. The moderating effect of reward for creativity on the relationship between creativity and performance was not observed when we operationalized creativity as an integrated, unidimensional construct. © ۲۰۱۵ Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Keywords: reward for creativity, novelty, usefulness, creativity C reativity is widely believed to be necessary for performance (Gilson, 2008; Simonton, 2000), success, and advancement (e.g., Elsbach & Hargadon, 2006; George & Zhou, 2002), and is viewed as the basis for innovations (e.g., Shin & Zhou, 2007) and competitive advantage (Brockbank, 1999). There is also widespread belief that creativity is positively related to employee performance (Simonton, 2000), yet there is scant empirical support for this (Gilson, 2008). Instead, previous research (e.g., George & Zhou, 2001) has often used creative performance as the outcome and has created criterion confusion by not differentiating between creativity and performance (Montag, Maertz, & Baer, 2012). Human resource management (HRM) practices have long been suggested (Brockbank, 1999) and empirically demonstrated to play a significant role in employee creativity (Binyamin & Carmeli, 2010; Dul, Ceylan, & Jaspers, 2011). One HRM practice that researchers examining employee performance have frequently examined is extrinsic rewards, yet the efficacy of such rewards for encouraging creativity remains subject to considerable debate (George, 2007; Shalley, Zhou, & Oldham, 2004), possibly because creativity is considered to be driven primarily by intrinsic motivation (Amabile, 1983, 1996; Hennessey & Amabile, 1998). This widely accepted view has been supported empirically (e.g., Shin & Zhou, 2003; Tierney, Farmer, & Graen, 1999). Thus, our focus in this article is to address the still controversial role that extrinsic rewards play in the creative process. Rather than asking whether extrinsic rewards stimulate or hinder creativity (e.g., Eisenberger & Cameron, 1996, 1998; Hennessey & Amabile, Downloaded from http://www.elearnica.ir 2 HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT Human Resource Management DOI: 10.1002/hrm In explicitly rewarding creativity, organizations hope to shape the expression of creativity toward behaviors or suggestions that benefit the organization. creative, behaviors or outcomes will not be considered creative unless the creativity is directed or focused on what the domain values. What a domain or organization values is signaled through incentives (Latham & Sue-Chan, 2014). Accordingly, rewards for creativity can likewise cue employees that they need to shift the focus of their work behavior from only expressing usefulness to emphasizing novelty more. There are thus several tightly intertwined themes here: the two components of creativity, the effect of extrinsic rewards on the expression of creativity, and the relationship between creativity and job performance. We seek to tie these themes together by integrating motivated information processing theory (Kunda, 1990) with agency theory (Eisenhardt, 1989; Kang & Yanadori, 2011; Wiseman, Cuevas-Rodriguez, & Gomez-Mejia, 2012) to investigate the yet unanswered question, “How does rewarding creativity influence the relationship between creativity and performance?” Amabile and colleagues (Amabile, 1983, 1996; Hennessey & Amabile, 2010), while noting the critical role of intrinsic motivation in creativity, nevertheless acknowledged the positive role that extrinsic rewards could have in the creative process, depending on the information implicit in the extrinsic reward. The informational value individuals derive from extrinsic rewards can be understood using motivated information processing theory (Kunda, 1990; Nickerson, 1998). This theory states that cognitive processes are motivated and hence determined by the pursuit of different goals. Accordingly, extrinsic rewards are processed by employees for information about which goals their organization wants them to achieve. Novelty and usefulness represent unrelated goals (Litchfield, 2008), so this theory can offer insights into how extrinsic rewards support an individual’s intrinsic motivation to express novel and useful behaviors. Agency theory holds that agents, the employees of organizations, often pursue goals that are independent of their principal, the employing organization (Eisenhardt, 1989). Extrinsic rewards are one means to align agent and principal goals (Kang & Yanadori, 2011) and, in the case of creativity, are a means to ensure that an employee’s creative expressions are aimed at meeting organizational goals. Creativity Some creativity scholars refer to creativity as the ability to produce novel ideas that are task appropriate and consider it to be a “property of an individual” (Sternberg, 2001, p. 361), while others, by stating that creativity is a process of psychological engagement in a creative activity that may or may 1998), a potentially more interesting way to resolve this debate is to ask whether such rewards change the nature of creativity being expressed. By expression of creativity, we refer to how creativity is shown to and consequently observed by others. Early researchers of creativity (e.g., Guilford, 1950) viewed creativity as a trait, but more recently, creativity has been examined as a behavior or outcome (e.g., Elsbach & Kramer, 2003). In the same way that organizational climate influences creative expressions (Amabile, 1996), by either encouraging or discouraging the expression of creative behaviors, so, too, would rewards influence the way in which creative impulses are expressed as ideas or behaviors. In explicitly rewarding creativity, organizations hope to shape the expression of creativity toward behaviors or suggestions that benefit the organization. Thus, changing how creativity is expressed would also have the potential to influence the creativity-performance relationship. An examination of the way in which expressed creativity changes due to extrinsic rewards must begin with a consideration of the conceptualization of creativity. Most published organizational research has adopted Amabile’s (1982, 1983) conceptualization of creativity as consisting of two dimensions, novelty and usefulness, and most empirical research has treated creativity as a unitary construct (e.g., Oldham & Cummings, 1996). Although it is clear that both are needed for creativity, an inherent tension between novelty and usefulness exists (Ford & Kuenzi, 2008; Litchfield, 2008; Yuan & Zhou, 2008), which implies that the expression of either might be more suitable for different situations, such as when finding versus evaluating solutions (D. T. Campbell, 1960; Ford & Gioia, 2000; Osborn, 1953; Rietzschel, Nijstad, & Stroebe, 2006). Consequently, recent experimental (e.g., Yuan & Zhou, 2008) and macro organizational studies (e.g., Fleming, Mingo, & Chen, 2007) have begun to separately examine novelty and usefulness. Creativity is not absolute or general but is relative and specific to the domain or sphere of activity in which the creative act or outcome occurs (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997). For example, Ang Lee’s movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was viewed as highly creative by Western reviewers, while Asian reviewers thought it was his weakest movie (Hempel & Sue-Chan, 2010; Niu & Sternberg, 2002). Given that the domain determines what is