When Thinking inside the Box Is Good: The Nuanced Relationship between Conformity and Creativity

Abstract

Creativity is one of the most valued employee skills, but there exists a tension in organizations, as managers want workers who are creative and, at the same time, who conform to existing norms in the organization. In the current paper we propose and study a nuanced relationship between conformity and creativity in the workplace, looking for conditions in which conformity is not detrimental for creativity. We test how the interaction of conformity with the personality dimensions of openness to experience and conscientiousness predicts creativity. Our results suggest that, while openness does not interact with conformity to predict creativity, conscientiousness does. In particular, when individuals are highly conscientious, conformity has a positive impact on creativity, while the conformity-creativity relationship is negative for individuals that are not very conscientious.