Proving my creativity: When and why leaders' idea rejection leads to employees' creative deviance?

It is not uncommon for employees to engage in creative deviance after their ideas are rejected by leaders. Yet, it is premature to assume that every employee will respond to leaders' rejection of their ideas by engaging in creative deviance. In this article, we employ identity-based control theory to elucidate when and how leaders' rejection of ideas leads to employees' creative deviance. Specifically, given that idea rejection provides feedback inconsistent with their identity expectations, we theorize that employees with higher creative role identities will experience stronger creative identity threat when encountering leaders' rejection. The creative identity threat in turn leads employees to reconfirm their identities by engaging in creative deviance because it can serve as a shortcut to restore their threatened identities. We conducted two studies utilizing three-wave time-lagged survey (Study 1: N = 228) and scenario-based experimental designs (Study 2: N = 232). Results from ANOVA and path analysis supported our hypotheses. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.