A Good Introduction

Introduction

In today’s world, many organizations find themselves in a competitive environment, where innovation is a top priority. We currently live in a highly globalising world which is changing at a high rate. Through innovation, organisations are better capable to adapt and to realise higher growth (Liao et. al., 2010). Therefore, innovation appears to be a key factor which should be treasured to maintain and especially enhance.

This is where creativity introduces it’s relevance, because creativity is the building block for innovation (Liao, Liu, Loi, 2010). Creativity, which is the production of ideas that are both novel and useful (Amabile, 1996), emerges from individuals (Scott, Bruce, 1994). Creating innovative initiatives and ideas is highly related to the degree of which employees are getting motivated by their leader to become creative. Thereby, it is of major relevance to take research on the motivation to display creative behaviour.

Leaders find themselves in a position where they need to find the right way of stimulating their subordinates to behave in a creative way. We confine our research to subordinate’s intrinsic motivation, while we expect this to be the key type of motivation. This due to the fact that a subordinate in this case is motivated from the inside, because he or she likes to do the –creative– task. We paraphrase this intrinsic motivation to display creative behaviour as the variable creativity-related intrinsic motivation. We refer to creativity-related intrinsic motivation by referring to theory provided by Amabile, (1983, 1988) intrinsic motivation is affecting employee’s decisions to initiate and support creative effort over the long run, so we can consider intrinsic motivation as one of the most prominent personal qualities for the reformation of creativity. We will further discuss this variable in the theory section.

So far, there has not been many research on creativity-related intrinsic motivation. However, this...