One requirement, multiple insights: The impact of innovation job requirement on employee radical and incremental creativity

Organizations are increasingly incorporating innovation into job requirements to encourage employees to generate and implement novel ideas (i.e., enhance employees’ creativity). Despite extensive research on the impact of innovation job requirements on creativity, the findings remain inconsistent, being either positive or negative. To address this issue, drawing on the regulatory focus theory, we focused on employees’ different types of creativity and explored how innovation job requirements impact employees’ radical versus incremental creativity. Through a questionnaire survey of 485 employees and 124 direct supervisors from two high-tech firms and one manufacturing firm in China, the empirical results indicated that innovation job requirements promoted expected image gains for promotion-focused employees, whereas for prevention-focused employees, innovation job requirements fostered incremental creativity by heightening expected image risks. These findings contribute valuable insights to research on innovation job requirements and creativity and provide practical guidance for organizations to foster employees’ different types of creativity.