Leader’s spouse sleep apnea impairs team creativity: the moderating role of sleep divorce

Our paper seeks to extend the literature on creativity and sleep research by examining not only how leader sleep can influence team creativity but also how the leader’s spouse’s experience with sleep (specifically, sleep apnea) can influence team creativity. Sleep apnea can disrupt not only the sleep of the person suffering from the disorder but also the bed partner of that person. Accordingly, we integrate crossover theory and literature on the prefrontal cortex in sleep to develop a moderated serial mediation model that examines the indirect effect of the leader’s spouse’s sleep apnea on team creativity via leader sleep (quantity and quality) and leader effort in processing creative ideas. Moreover, we investigate one partial solution to this issue: sleep divorce as a moderator that weakens these effects. In a survey-based field study using multi-wave and multi-source data, we find support for our hypotheses.