Creativity can be a valuable quality in employees. It can lead them to generate new ideas and approaches, refine existing procedures, and find alternatives, thus boosting their - and their company's - performance. A new study provides evidence of this phenomenon and identifies factors that enhance employee creativity.

Yaping Gong and Jiing-Lih Farh of HKUST and Jia-Chi Huang surveyed 178 Taiwanese insurance agents and their supervisors and found that agents who scored higher on creativity received better performance appraisals from their managers and, significantly, also had better sales results during the period in which the study was administered.

"Creativity is critical for an organisation's survival and competitiveness," they said. "Employee creativity is likely to benefit organisations, reinforcing the practical value of research that examines the antecedents to employee creativity."

The authors were particularly interested in two antecedents, transformational leadership and employee learning orientation, which they reckoned could enhance employee creativity, thereby enhancing performance.

Transformational leadership is when managers are able to stimulate and motivate employees to perform beyond expectations, while learning orientation is the employee's internal drive to develop their competence. The authors showed that both antecedents enhanced employee creativity over time - time being an important factor because people needed repeated interactions with transformational leaders, and time to explore, learn and create.

The authors also identified a mechanism through which these antecedents could translate into more creative outcomes: the employee's "creative self-efficacy", or their belief that they had the ability to produce creative outcomes.

"Employee learning orientation and transformational leadership relate to employee creativity through their influence on employee creative self-efficacy," they said.

"Employees are less likely to experience aversive physiological arousal with the support and encouragement of transformational leaders, and this helps to sustain their creative self-efficacy."

"Learning-oriented individuals are also able to maintain their efficacy beliefs, by focusing their attention on how to improve their competence throughout the uncertainty of the creative journey. This focus on self-improvement rather than external approval shields them from others' negative reactions that may arise during the creative process."

This was the first study to look at the role of creative self-efficacy and also to examine employee creativity in a corporate setting, as opposed to an academic one.

The authors suggested managers could use the findings in three ways. They could set out to serve as creative role models and verbally persuade employees that they can also be creative. They could personally demonstrate and instruct their employees on creativity-relevant skills, and provide hands-on opportunities to apply these skills. And they could alleviate employee fear and anxiety that may arise from the uncertainty of creative endeavours, by offering support and encouragement.

"Managers can be instrumental in providing an environment that stimulates and nourishes creative self-efficacy," they said.