Leaders’ receptivity to subordinates’ creative input: The role of achievement goals and composition of creative input

Abstract

We identified leaders’ achievement goals and composition of creative input as important factors that can clarify when and why leaders are receptive to, and supportive of, subordinates’ creative input. As hypothesized, in two experimental studies, we found that relative to mastery goal leaders, performance goal leaders were less receptive to subordinates’ voiced creative input. In Study 1, we further showed that image threat appraisal and learning opportunity appraisal mediated this effect. In Study 2, we demonstrated that when merely creative ideas were expressed by the subordinate, performance goal leaders responded like mastery goal leaders. However, as in Study 1, performance goal leaders were less receptive to, and less supportive of, subordinates’ creative input than mastery goal leaders when the composition of subordinates’ creative input included both problem identifications and creative ideas.

Keywords:

• Goal orientation
• Creativity
• Leader behaviours
• Responsiveness
• Image threat
• Learning opportunity

Notes

¹ With a sample of n = 105, a sensitivity power analyses executed with G*Power 3.1 (Faul, Erdfelder, Buchner, & Lang, 2009; O’Keefe, 2007) revealed that interaction effects as small as f = 0.39 (i.e., a medium-to-large sized effect as defined by Cohen, 1988) could be detected with desired levels of α = β = .05.