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The purpose of this paper is to draw upon social information processing theory to examine the sequential mediating roles of psychological safety and creative process engagement between participative leadership on creativity.

Using a time-lagged sample of 526 supervisor–subordinate dyads from R&D teams of five enterprises located in the southwest part of China, we tested the theoretical model using structural equation modelling (SEM) as well as with the MPLUS 7.0 software.

Results indicated that participative leadership is positively related to creative process engagement; psychological safety significantly mediates the relationship between participative leadership and creative process engagement; creative process engagement significantly mediates the relationship between psychological safety and employee creativity; psychological safety and creative process engagement sequentially mediates the relationship between participative leadership and creativity.

The study findings imply that the participative leadership behaviors of managers or supervisor's nurtures employees psychological safety to take risk and promotes employee engagement in creativity relevant ventures leading to creativity.

The findings contribute new knowledge on the relationship between participative leadership and creativity by uncovering the causal chain of a cognitive mechanism (psychological safety) with a behavioral mechanism (creative process engagement).

Why are some organizations more innovative than others? The purpose of this paper is to propose a comprehensive model of innovation to modify Kanter's model of innovation in organizations that rely solely on structural factors – to the exclusion of managerial characteristics – to explain differences in innovations across organizations.

The proposed model of innovation in organizations uses the cognitive attitudes of managers in an organization as the underlying explanation for the micro‐processes that result in innovation.

The study identifies some dimensions of managerial cognition that possibly influence the important tasks of innovation identified in Kanter's model.

The model considers five dimensions of managerial mindset – cosmopolitanism, cognitive complexity, entrepreneurship, boundary spanning, and adaptability – as predictors of the different tasks in Kanter's model of innovation. This list is by no means exhaustive and hence there could be many other characteristics that could be included in the model. Testing the model could therefore lead to omitted variable bias.

This paper has huge practical implications for business firms that seek to embrace innovation to grow. Most organizations set up structural processes to foster innovation while ignoring the human dimensions that explain innovation. If the cognitive attitude of employees or citizens explains the level of innovation in an organization or society then organizations and societies can work on measures that will influence the cognitive attitudes of their employees and citizens, respectively.

This paper develops a multi‐dimensional construct termed as “managerial mindset” to provide a new perspective on the innovation process in an organization. The individual/manager in the organization is considered as the focal point for understanding the process of innovation as opposed to the structural features in Kanter's model.

This paper aims to examine the creative environment's effect on a worker's intent to turnover. It was designed to investigate the creative environment's role on garden variety creativity (non‐elite) workers' organizational outcomes.

A survey was used to collect data from a heterogeneous sample of garden variety creativity workers. This data was analyzed using a structural equation model.

Structural equation model analysis results indicated a good fit between the hypothesized model and the sample data. The goodness‐of‐fit index was 0.97, and the RMSEA was 0.06. Results indicated a significant path coefficient of −0.77 between creative environment and intent to turnover.

From this study, future research needs to be conducted that will expand the findings' generalizability. Also, additional work should develop specific implementation practices for appropriate organizational redesign.

These findings show the strong role that the creative environment has on worker turnover intentions. As such, this study provides useful insights for leadership, job design, and enrichment practices. The study also provides a useful framework for examining the creative environment.

This paper increases the understanding of the creative environment's role in broad workplace outcomes. Information and constructs are also provided about the rarely examined garden variety creativity worker. The paper also provides a useful, easily administered creative environment scale.

The aim of this study is to explore the information needs and behaviors of practicing theatre artists. Psychological research into creativity provides a framework for understanding both theatre artists' information‐seeking behavior and the role of information seeking and gathering in the creative process.

The exploratory study presents findings from an online questionnaire of 73 practicing theatre artists and qualitative data gathered from eight interviews with theatre professionals.

The study reveals that theatre artists seek information for six primary purposes: understanding a work's historical, cultural, and critical background; finding sources of inspiration; learning about contemporary or historical theatre productions, artists, and events; learning technical or process information; finding performance materials; and furthering career goals. Theatre artists view the information search process as being essential to their creative activities, and their first‐hand accounts of their artistic experiences illuminate the critical role that information seeking and gathering play in the creative process.

Some theatre professions, such as lighting or sound design, were represented in the questionnaire but were not represented in the interviews.

The study has practical implications for the delivery of library and internet theatre art collections and information services.

Few studies have examined the information‐seeking behavior of practicing theatre artists. The paper demonstrates that studies of artists can be used to understand the role of information seeking and gathering in the creative processes of people working in various subject domains.

Specific research on the meaning of organizational memory (OM), including databases, for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and their performance is limited. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationships between open-mindedness culture (OMC), OM, SME innovativeness and customer satisfaction.

Five hypotheses were formulated and tested using the partial least squares method. The survey data were collected from 120 Polish SMEs.

A positive and significant relationship between OMC and OM was found. OM has both direct and indirect impacts on customer satisfaction through firms’ innovativeness. The results confirmed the correlation between firms’ innovativeness and customer satisfaction.

The focus on SMEs in a single country limits the generalizability of the results.

The findings of this research can inform SME managers who are willing to improve operational performance. This study suggests that OMC is a prior stage in building, updating and using OM in the form of databases. Leveraging databases is a way to incrementally increase firms’ innovativeness and customer satisfaction.

This paper fills an important gap in the extant literature by empirically testing the relationship between OMC, OM, firms’ innovativeness and customer satisfaction. This study is the first ever to study these relationships within the context of SMEs.

This commentary suggests areas that could be further developed in Reiter-Palmon, Herman, and Yammarino's call for a multi-level analysis of the underlying cognitive structures of both teams and individuals. The chapter by Reiter-Palmon, Herman, and Yammarino effectively demonstrates the importance of cognition in the understanding of individual and team creativity. However, the importance of other issues – in particular, team process and composition – also needs to be more fully considered when moving from the individual level to the team level. This commentary addresses the conceptual challenge of attempting to take a purely cognitive approach for teams, and presents some further arguments for considering how team process and composition influence team cognition and ultimately team creative problem solving. It also discusses the value of using some type of team intervention to enhance team creative problem-solving processes. Finally, it argues for the importance of considering the dynamic nature of some teams and examining how changes in team membership can affect team cognition.

The authors explain the conditions under which positive personality traits and work environment factors either interact synergistically or yield diminishing-gains when creative individuals are in a supportive working environment.

Data were obtained using a time-lagged design. The final sample includes 350 researchers from 64 scientific research teams.

The results indicate that the need for cognition is positively associated with individual creativity. Furthermore, this study suggests that perceived organizational support for creativity can complement an individual's need for cognition when it comes to individual creativity. This indicates a synergistic pattern. On the other hand, psychological safety can substitute for an individual's need for cognition when influencing individual creativity. Thus, a diminishing-gains pattern also exists.

The results suggest that when individuals are stuck in environments of low psychological safety, yet perceive higher levels of organizational support for creativity, their levels of creativity can be boosted.

This study is among one of the first to explore a supportive context's complementary or substitution effect on positive personality traits by demonstrating the complementary effect of perceived organizational support for creativity and the substitution effect of psychological safety. This study validates the positive effect of the need for cognition on creativity. This study also enriches the psychological safety literature by showing that psychological safety is not always necessary for individuals with a high need for cognition.

Chapter 8 synthesizes the research findings from the processes of sensory cognition into the design and configuration of the learning environment. The focus of cognition changes perspective and focus from the attributes of an external stimulus to the internal processes of integration with prior learning and internalization into a new cognition of the individual, which is labeled as the individual's learning ecology. These processes provide a plausible model for the design of the learning environment dimension, which internalizes the learning into transformational and ultimately lifelong learning. The processes of sensory cognition provide a viable and practical model to engineer learning cognition in the same way the brain does with sensory cognition. Like sensory cognition, learning cognition is the result of the structure of the learning environment.

The purpose of this study is to test a model connecting Chinese employees’ positive and negative affect and creative self-efficacy with supervisor-rated creative performance in Chinese business. Building on the cognitive tuning theory, this paper answers several calls for research to examine the joint effects of positive and negative affects on creative performance in the China business environment.

The participants were drawn from one of the largest petrochemical companies in China. We drew 459 leader-subordinate dyads across different jobs situated in multiple divisions to complete our surveys. The authors used hierarchical linear modeling to test the hypotheses.

The findings suggest that creative self-efficacy has a positive influence on creative performance during low PA scenarios. The authors also demonstrated that for employees in China, creative self-efficacy has a positive influence on creativity when employees experience both low levels of positive affect and high levels of negative affect.

As the findings suggest, Chinese employees who experience positive affect may engage in heuristic, top-down cognitive processes. Furthermore, findings from the present study also serve to extend the scope of the cognitive tuning model by testing the informational roles of positive and negative affects in self-regulatory processes rather than focusing directly on the main effects of employee affect. An important finding in this study is the three-way interaction indicating that individuals experiencing low positive affect and high negative affect will see a strong connection between creative self-efficacy and creative performance.

Organizations may fail to innovate because receivers exhibit bias against adopting creative ideas. This paper explores many motivational, cognitive, and affective factors that can cause receivers to hinder the creativity–innovation process. In particular, receivers may engage in motivated reasoning and skepticism against creative ideas, face barriers to recognizing creative value, and experience negative affect when receiving creative ideas. Each creative adoption decision point during the creativity–innovation process is an opportunity for bias to derail progress. This helps explain why innovation can be so difficult. Understanding the biases that hinder the creativity–innovation process allows individuals and organizations to take action to mitigate them.