Recognizing creative leadership: Can creative idea expression negatively relate to perceptions of leadership potential?

By Jennifer S. Mueller, Jack A. Goncalo, Dishan Kamdar. 2011

98 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Drawing on and extending prototype theories of creativity and leadership, we theorize that the expression of creative ideas may diminish judgments of leadership potential unless the charismatic leadership prototype is activated in the minds of social perceivers. Study 1 shows that creative idea expression is negatively related to perceptions of leadership potential in a sample of employees working in jobs that required creative problem solving. Study 2 shows that participants randomly instructed to express creative solutions during an interaction are viewed as having lower leadership potential. A third scenario study replicated this finding showing that participants attributed less leadership potential to targets expressing creative ideas, except when the “charismatic” leader prototype was activated. In sum, we show that the negative association between expressing creative ideas and leadership potential is robust and underscores an important but previously unidentified bias against selecting effective leaders.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f3087c02d5eae4847c63bc60834a84d71e78d6af

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In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

Implicit Leadership and Followership Theories “in the wild”: Taking stock of information-processing approaches to leadership and followership in organizational settings (2013, background): “18 Building upon Offermann et al.’s (1994) scale, Epitropaki (2000) and Epitropaki and Martin (2004) developed the most recent explicit measure of ILTs.”
Creative Leadership: A Multi-Context Conceptualization† (2015, background): “Most organizations tend to promote executives who preserve the status quo, do not take risks, and stick to useful and working solutions (Basadur & Basadur, 2011; Mueller et al., 2011), although many organizations claim that creative leadership is essential to them.”
In Praise of Clark Kent: Creative Metacognition and the Importance of Teaching Kids When (Not) to Be Creative (2013, background): “A striking study by Mueller, Goncalo, and Kamdar (2011) found that creativity is viewed as a negative trait for leaders.”
Do People Recognize the Four Cs? Examining Layperson Conceptions of Creativity (2013, background): “Likewise, Mueller, Goncalo, and Kamdar (2011) found that creativity is viewed as a negative trait for leaders.”
Motivational mechanisms of employee creativity: A meta-analytic examination and theoretical extension of the creativity literature (2016, unknown): “O rganizational Behavior and H um an D ecision Processes (2016),http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2016.08.001 Appendix C (continued) Study N a of creativity a of CSE r Country Individualismb Tightnessc Creativity measured Self-efficacy measuree Publication statusf Watt (2007) 559 .94 .87 .67a US 40 ”