Why and When Narcissistic Employees Are More Creative in the Workplace? A Social Cognitive Perspective

ABSTRACT The question of whether narcissists are more creative than peers has attracted much scholarly attention in both psychology and organizational management sciences. Drawing from social cognitive theory, we theorized that the relationship between narcissism and creativity could be explained by individual creative self-efficacy, which depends on one's direct and vicarious experiences of creativity. Drawing from trait activation theory, we further proposed organizational valuing of creativity as a key contextual moderator that determines whether narcissism facilitates or inhibits creative self-efficacy and, in turn, creativity. We suggest that high organizational valuing of creativity will energize narcissists to put their attention and effort into both direct and vicarious experiences of creativity, enhancing their creative self-efficacy and creativity. We tested our conceptual model through a field study with data collected from 269 full-time employees working in 86 work teams. The empirical results provided support for the social cognitive explanation for the positive relationship between narcissism and creativity in the context of high organizational valuing of creativity. Our study not only resolved prior debates on the relationship between narcissism and creativity but also provided direct empirical support for social cognitive theory and the person-in-context interactionist perspective of creativity research. 摘要： 针对自恋者是否比其他人更有创造力这一问题，心理学和组织管理科学领域的学者们已经进行了一系列探讨，并得出了不一致的结论。为了化解以往的争论，本研究从社会认知理论出发，提出自恋人格和创造力之间的关系取决于个体对创造力的直接经验和间接经验中得出的创造力自我效能来解释。根据特质激活理论，组织对创造力的重视是决定自恋特质是否会促进或抑制创造力自我效能并影响其创造力的关键情境因素。具体来讲，组织对创造力的高度重视会激发自恋员工将注意力和努力投入到与创造力有关的直接和间接经验中，从而提高他们的创造力自我效能和创造力。通过对来自86个工作团队的269名全职员工进行问卷调查，我们对本研究提出的理论模型进行了实证检验。数据分析结果支持了在高创造力重视环境下，自恋特质正向影响创造力的社会认知解释。本研究不仅化解了自恋特质与创造力之间关系的争论，而且为社会认知理论和情境与人交互视角的创造力研究提供了直接的实证支持。