Abstract
Employee creativity has been an integral part of firm innovation, which relies heavily on the journey of creative ideas within organizational processes. Specifically, organizational contingencies and task design are the essential extrinsic factors that affect employee’s motivation to engage in creative processes. Individuals’ intrinsic attributes also determine their cognitive ability to creative thinking. Every company is characterized by unique intra-organizational institutions that not only affect how employees perform the tasks but also their willingness to learn and embrace uncertainty. From a micro point of view, the heart of organizational learning is rooted in employees work curiosity, which embodies the motivational drive for handling uncertainty and exploring the unknown. We use self-determination theory (SDT) and cognitive evaluation theory (CET) to explore the cognitive processes through which personnel identify task-related problems, seek new information, test novel ideas, and implement them to improve routine operations and introduce innovative solutions. With a systematic literature review, this study integrates the existing research on cognitive psychology and organizational behavior, proposing a research framework that elaborates how organization environments affect employees' creative process engagement through stimulating or curbing their work engagement and work curiosity. Moreover, we adopt the interactionist view of organizational creativity to investigate the moderating role of individual differences. Over the three decades, organizational creativity has emerged as a part of mainstream areas in applied psychology and human resource management, and yet little attention was given to understand the role of work curiosity and how it interacts with organizational context and other individual attributes to determine the personnel's willingness to engage in creative activities. This study, therefore, develops theoretical propositions that point to the avenue for future research that attempts to disentangle the dynamics between organization-motivation-ideation in the work settings.