AI‐Enabled Creativity: How Generative AI Affordances Shape Creative Work

Abstract

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is rapidly reshaping organizational workflows and holds considerable promise for supporting creative work. Yet, its role in shaping employee creativity remains not fully understood. Drawing on technology affordance theory, this study conceptualizes perceived competence, communication speed, and self-learning ability as perceived GenAI characteristics and examines their associations with employee creativity through knowledge acquisition and information support as forms of affordance actualization. It also considers perceived opacity as a boundary condition on the relationship between knowledge acquisition and creativity. The empirical evidence is drawn from a three-wave, multi-source dataset of 426 matched employee–supervisor pairs in AI-intensive industries in China. The findings suggest that these perceived GenAI characteristics are positively linked to both knowledge acquisition and information support, which are in turn positively associated with employee creativity. Perceived opacity weakens the positive relationship between knowledge acquisition and creativity. This study extends research on AI-enabled creativity by distinguishing employees’ perceptions of GenAI characteristics from the affordances they actualize in practice, and by specifying the intermediate processes through which such perceptions become consequential for creative outcomes. The findings also offer practical implications for organizations seeking to design and implement GenAI systems that better support employees’ creativity.