| In today's business environment, creativity has become essential for gaining and sustaining competitive advantage for organizations. As such, researchers and practitioners alike have been interested in understanding ways to enhance creativity. In today's highly interactive work environment social relationships have become an important feature of organizational life. Yet there has been little empirical research that focuses on the relational environment and its impact on creativity. To fill this gap in the literature, this study develops and empirically tests a social exchange model of creativity, proposing that employees' perceptions of the relational environment (i.e., fairness and trust) will influence their social exchange relationships, which in turn will affect creativity-relevant behaviors, and ultimately, creativity. The model simultaneously proposes and tests these linkages for both organizational and supervisory levels.; To test the model, the data were collected from 205 employees and their supervisors at a large chemical engineering plant, where creativity is an explicitly stated goal. Employees reported on their perceptions of organizational fairness and trust, supervisory fairness and trust, perceived organizational support, and leader member exchange. Supervisors provided information on employees' creativity-relevant behaviors (information sharing, risk taking, social loafing, and political tactics), and creativity.; Structural equation modeling was used to analyze the data and test the social exchange model of creativity. The results revealed support for several hypotheses. At the organizational level, employees' perceptions of procedural and informational justice were significantly related to organizational trust, which in turn was significantly related to perceived organizational support. Furthermore, perceived organizational support was marginally related to two types of political tactics, exchange and upward appeal, which were not found to be related to creativity. At the supervisory level, employees' perceptions of supervisory distributive justice and interpersonal justice were significantly, and supervisory informational justice was marginally, related to supervisory trust, which in turn was significantly related to leader member exchange. Finally, leader member exchange was significantly related to information sharing and social loafing, both of which were significantly related to creativity.; Overall, these results show that a fair and trusting environment can be important for fostering stronger exchange relationships, and hence, creativity. These results have important implications for both research and practice. |
