Are Individual-Level Factors Necessary for Creativity in the Workplace? A Necessary Condition Analysis

Are individual-level factors necessary for creativity to occur in the workplace? Using a novel statistical approach, Necessary Condition Analysis, we explored empirically whether individual factors were critical to creativity in the workplace, drawing on Amabile’s componential theory, using a sample of 1384 workers in France. We examined three types of drivers: intrinsic motivation, job self-efficacy and creative self-efficacy. We examined four known creativity-relevant processes: openness to experience, creative personality, creative personal identity, as well as creative process engagement. Crucially, results showed that creative self-efficacy was a critical driver for creativity: an employee will not be able to achieve high creative performance if he or she does not have strong confidence about his or her creative capacities, regardless of other factors. However, neither job self-efficacy nor intrinsic motivation proved to be necessary for creativity: their absence can be compensated by other factors. We observed that all creativity-relevant processes appeared necessary for creativity, even though they each showed small effect sizes. This study and its findings highlight the need to distinguish between what makes a variable “important” versus “necessary,” in the field of creativity and innovation.