TY - CHAP
T1 - The relationship between personality and the creativity of frontline employees
T2 - evidence from services
AU - Coelho, Filipe
AU - Lages, Cristiana R.
AU - Sousa, Carlos M.P.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2016, The Academy of Marketing Science.
PY - 2016
Y1 - 2016
N2 - Despite employee creativity being paramount in organizational innovation, the soft (i.e. people) innovation side has received less attention (Brenton and Levin 2012). This study aims to remedy this lack of attention to the soft side of innovation by investigating the relationship between employees’ personality traits and their creativity. While this relationship has received some research attention, past research has mostly focused on the link between the Five Factor model and creativity. Since the Five Factor model of personality has been criticized for providing a limited account of an individual’s personality (see Block 1995; Paunonen and Jackson 2000), this study addresses this criticism by considering additional personality traits recently investigated in the service literature as determinants of employee behaviour. These other traits comprise competitiveness, materialism, need for learning, and need for activity (see Brown et al. 2002; Harris et al. 2005). Moreover, we predict that personality traits exert differentiated effects on creativity in this study’s setting (i.e. services) when compared to other settings. In a services setting, frontline employees are frequently responsible for the first and, many times, the only interaction with the customer (Hartline et al. 2000; Lages and Piercy 2012) and customers’ needs are quite heterogeneous, implying that satisfying customers requires flexibility from employees (Dubinsky et al. 1986). These specificities suggest that findings on the effects of personality on creativity obtained in other settings may not hold in services. Finally, while past research has focused on linear effects, this study examines the existence of non-linear effects between personality traits and creativity. The results not only indicate that the additional personality traits to the Five Factor model have an impact on creativity, but also that some traits’ effects differ from those obtained in studies conducted in other settings such as arts and science. Lastly, the findings also show that five personality traits have non-linear effects on creativity.
AB - Despite employee creativity being paramount in organizational innovation, the soft (i.e. people) innovation side has received less attention (Brenton and Levin 2012). This study aims to remedy this lack of attention to the soft side of innovation by investigating the relationship between employees’ personality traits and their creativity. While this relationship has received some research attention, past research has mostly focused on the link between the Five Factor model and creativity. Since the Five Factor model of personality has been criticized for providing a limited account of an individual’s personality (see Block 1995; Paunonen and Jackson 2000), this study addresses this criticism by considering additional personality traits recently investigated in the service literature as determinants of employee behaviour. These other traits comprise competitiveness, materialism, need for learning, and need for activity (see Brown et al. 2002; Harris et al. 2005). Moreover, we predict that personality traits exert differentiated effects on creativity in this study’s setting (i.e. services) when compared to other settings. In a services setting, frontline employees are frequently responsible for the first and, many times, the only interaction with the customer (Hartline et al. 2000; Lages and Piercy 2012) and customers’ needs are quite heterogeneous, implying that satisfying customers requires flexibility from employees (Dubinsky et al. 1986). These specificities suggest that findings on the effects of personality on creativity obtained in other settings may not hold in services. Finally, while past research has focused on linear effects, this study examines the existence of non-linear effects between personality traits and creativity. The results not only indicate that the additional personality traits to the Five Factor model have an impact on creativity, but also that some traits’ effects differ from those obtained in studies conducted in other settings such as arts and science. Lastly, the findings also show that five personality traits have non-linear effects on creativity.
KW - Creativity
KW - Linear, non-linear and curvilinear effects
KW - Personality
KW - Service employees
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85125038882&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-319-19428-8_147
DO - 10.1007/978-3-319-19428-8_147
M3 - Chapter
AN - SCOPUS:85125038882
T3 - Developments in Marketing Science: Proceedings of the Academy of Marketing Science
SP - 589
EP - 590
BT - Developments in marketing science
PB - Springer Nature
ER -