The Impact of Supervisory Leadership, Workplace Climate, and Individual Characteristics on Follower Creativity in Scientific Labs: A Multiple Regression Study

Innovation, the process of implementing creative ideas into useful products, often through research and development (R&D), is a vital process for organizations to maintain global technological relevancy, often resulting in far reaching impacts to society. Creative self-efficacy, the confidence someone has that they can be creative while performing domain-relevant tasks, is a self-perceived personality component believed to be a factor in a person’s creative endeavors. This explanatory study provides a cross-sectional investigation into the relationship between organizational and individual factors and creative self-efficacy of researchers working in R&D labs in the U.S. The Survey of Creative Self-Efficacy in the R&D Lab was created for this study from relevant validated surveys; included are 50-items using a 5-point Likert scale, and one open-ended question designed to capture what study participants believed they would need in an ideal creative R&D lab. A multiple regression analysis was conducted to investigate the relationship among the study variables. Content analysis was performed on the open-ended answers. Quantitative results showed that the individual factors of intrinsic motivation and risk-taking were significant predictors of creative self-efficacy. Reflexive thematic analysis of the qualitative data showed that the study participants believed that an ideal creative R&D lab manifested through shared values between collaborators and through organizational level factors, such as access to resources, good communication, mentorship, and agency. This study highlights the importance of intrinsic motivation and disciplined risk-taking, through the development of domain-specific personal agency within innovation-focused learning organizations which employ researchers to perform R&D lab work.