The impact of contextual and personal characteristics on employee creativity in Korean firms

This study investigated the impact of contextual characteristics (i.e., organizational learning culture, leader-member exchange (LMX) quality, and perceived job complexity) and personal characteristics (i.e., proactive personality) on employee creativity assessed by their supervisors. On the basis of theoretical linkages among the constructs, a conceptual model and hypotheses were established. The sample was drawn from six Korean firms, including two Fortune Global 500 companies. While 463 employees and 340 supervisors responded, the number of matched dyadic data was 167.;The quality of factor structures of five measurement models consisting 37 items was assessed by an overall confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The hypothesized structural model was tested and compared against the two nested alternative models. As a result, the hypothesized model was found to be the best-fit model, in terms of the goodness-of-fit, the estimated parameters with theoretical relationships, and parsimony.;The results suggested that distal antecedents (organizational learning culture and proactive personality) jointly impacted on proximal antecedents (LMX quality and perceived job complexity), which in turn contributed to employee creativity. Compared with proactive personality, however, organizational learning culture had more impact higher indirect effects on employee creativity as well as on the proximal antecedents. Four of six hypotheses were supported. The relationship between proactive personality and LMX quality, and the relationship between perceived job complexity and employee creativity turned out to be non-significant. Lastly, the model could explain only 12% of the variance in employee creativity, suggesting that other factors that were not considered in this study may have greater impact on employee creativity.