Emotional intelligence and employee creativity in high-tech firms

The relationship between emotional intelligence (EI) and creativity remains poorly understood. To address this gap, we have developed and tested a model that introduces novel mediating mechanisms, both positive and negative, to understand how EI affects employee creativity. We propose that EI influences variables with a high emotional content, which, in turn, affects the creative responses of employees, with employee creativity being assessed by supervisors. Based on a sample of 249 employees from high-tech firms, the results indicate that EI is directly related to task conflict, role stressors, and self-efficacy. Task conflict, in turn, contributes to role stressors, which is associated with creative behaviours and self-efficacy. Finally, self-efficacy is also related to employee creativity. Moreover, we determined that EI is not directly related to creativity and that its total indirect effect is also not significant. This appears to be the result of the complex set of transmission mechanisms considered in the study. While EI appears to indirectly contribute to creativity through, for example, self-efficacy, it also appears to mitigate it through role ambiguity. These results represent a set of novel contributions to existing knowledge. Overall, our findings suggest that the relationship between EI and creativity is complex and that managers should carefully consider how to leverage emotional intelligence to foster creativity.