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

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.