Employee incremental and radical creativity

Employee creativity provides the raw materials or ingredients for organizations to remain flexible and to successfully adjust to shifting markets, competition, and technological developments. Employees exhibit creativity when they come up with novel and potentially useful ideas concerning products, services, processes, and procedures. Inherent in this definition is that creativity can range from incremental adaptations to existing thoughts and practices to radical breakthroughs that deviate substantially from the status quo. Although the conceptual distinction between incremental and radical creativity has been made before, the vast majority of empirical research has defined and measured employee creativity as a unitary construct.

In her dissertation, Ye Liu conducted three empirical field studies to examine why, when, and how creative role expectations, empowering leadership, and interdependent and independent self-construals may have differential relationships with employee incremental and radical creativity. Her findings suggest that, compared with incremental creativity, radical creativity requires a higher cognitive threshold (i.e., creative cognitive style), more far-reaching generation processes (i.e., self-efficacy for creativity), and relatively independent behavioral strategies in the creative process. As such, she provides solid empirical evidence for the conceptual distinction between incremental and radical creativity and advance our understanding of differential antecedents, process mechanisms, and boundary conditions underlying these two forms of creativity.

More information

• Contact: Ye Liu
• Link to the dissertation