| One employee creativity model, the componential model, has emphasized the importance of three major personal attributes: intrinsic motivation, domain-relevant skills, and creativity-relevant processes (Amabile, 1988). Another model, the interactionist model, has emphasized the importance of environmental, personal, and contextual variables working in tandem to influence creativity (Woodman et al., 1993). The current study is the first to integrate the major tenets of both of these employee creativity models. In a series of hypotheses, I predicted that elements of the work environment (organizational and supervisory encouragement, coworker support, job-required creativity, autonomy, training and resource availability, and job demands) interacted with employees' personal attributes to influence creativity, and that these relationships would be mediated by intrinsic motivation and domain-relevant skills.;The current study was performed by collecting survey data from employees and their supervisors. Three separate organizational samples were combined into one larger sample. In order to control for potential group effects, I used hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) to analyze my data (Raudenbush & Bryk, 2002).;Results of the current study do not support the integration of the two models of creativity. None of the personal components had a main effect on creativity. Therefore, hypotheses pertaining to mediation by intrinsic motivation and domain-relevant skills were not tested.;There was, however an interaction observed between intrinsic motivation and domain-relevant skills. Intrinsic motivation only had a positive relation with creativity when domain-relevant skills were high.;Regarding the predictions for work environment effects on creativity, two significant effects were found. However, none of the predicted person-by-situation interactions were observed. The presence of high levels of job demands was marginally negatively related to creativity. There was also an interaction between job-required creativity and creativity-relevant processes. Contrary to prediction, the shape of the results suggested that job-required creativity was most related to creativity among those low in creativity-relevant processes.;A major contribution of the present study was the use of HLM methodology for testing hypotheses involving supervisor ratings of creativity. The study's analyses show that supervisor creativity ratings do vary as a function of the group whose members are being rated. |
