Are open individuals more creative? The interaction effects of leadership factors on creativity

In the information era of the rapid growth of knowledge, creativity is the key to the survival and maintenance of competitive advantage of organizations. From an interactional perspective, this paper extends the research on individual creativity by integrating personality traits and leadership factors. Using multi-sourced, matched data from 217 supervisor-employee dyads of 23 companies in China, we found that openness to experience is positively related to employee creativity, while close monitoring is negatively related to employee creativity. Furthermore, employees who are openness to experience are more creative when leader creativity expectations is high rather than low. Finally, the interaction between close monitoring and openness to experience has no significant impact on employee creativity.