The Creativity‐Performance Relationship: How Rewarding Creativity Moderates the Expression of Creativity

• Author: Christina Sue‐Chan,Paul S. Hempel
• Date: 01 July 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/hrm.21682
• Published date: 01 July 2016

Human Resource Management

© 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com).

DOI:10.1002/hrm.21682

Correspondence to: Christina Sue-Chan, Department of Management, City University of Hong Kong, Tat Chee

Avenue, Kowloon, Hong Kong S.A.R, China, Phone: 852-34428177, Fax: 852-34420309, E-mail: csuechan@cityu.edu.hk

THE CREATIVITY-PERFORMANCE

RELATIONSHIP: HOW REWARDING

CREATIVITY MODERATES THE

EXPRESSION OF CREATIVITY

CHRISTINA SUE-CHAN AND PAUL S. HEMPEL

Researchers have argued that creativity is intrinsically motivated, and that reward-

ing 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 sepa-

rate dimensions. High perceived reward enhances the relationship between nov-

elty 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. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Keywords: reward for creativity, novelty, usefulness, creativity

Creativity is widely believed to be

necessary for performance (Gilson, 2008;

Simonton, 2000), success, and advance-

ment (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 creativ-

ity is positively related to employee performance

(Simonton, 2000), yet there is scant empirical

support for this (Gilson, 2008). Instead, previ-

ous research (e.g., George & Zhou, 2001) has

often used creative performance as the outcome

and has created criterion confusion by not dif-

ferentiating between creativity and performance

(Montag, Maertz, & Baer, 2012).

Human resource management (HRM) prac-

tices 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 extrin-

sic rewards, yet the efficacy of such rewards for

encouraging creativity remains subject to con-

siderable 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 contro-

versial role that extrinsic rewards play in the cre-

ative process.

Rather than asking whether extrinsic rewards

stimulate or hinder creativity (e.g., Eisenberger

& Cameron, 1996, 1998; Hennessey & Amabile,

Human Resource Management, July–August 2016, Vol. 55, No. 4. Pp. 637–653

© 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com).

DOI:10.1002/hrm.21682

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 con-

sidered 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 useful-

ness 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 rela-

tionship between creativity and performance?”

Amabile and colleagues (Amabile, 1983, 1996;

Hennessey & Amabile, 2010), while noting the

critical role of intrinsic motivation in creativ-

ity, 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 pro-

cessing 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 unre-

lated 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 prin-

cipal, 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 appro-

priate and consider it to be a “property of an indi-

vidual” (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 cre-

ativity 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 expres-

sion 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-per-

formance relationship.

An examination of the way in

which expressed creativity changes

due to extrinsic rewards must begin

with a consideration of the concep-

tualization of creativity. Most pub-

lished organizational research has

adopted Amabile’s (1982, 1983) con-

ceptualization of creativity as con-

sisting 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 cre-

ativity, 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 experi-

mental (e.g., Yuan & Zhou, 2008) and macro orga-

nizational studies (e.g., Fleming, Mingo, & Chen,

2007) have begun to separately examine novelty

and usefulness.

Creativity is not absolute or general but is rela-

tive and specific to the domain or sphere of activ-

ity 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

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