Abstract
Research on creativity recognition has been undeveloped compared to that on creativity generation in modern-day organizations. Past research generally elaborates on creativity recognition from the receiver’s side rather than taking an interactive perspective that involves the creator’s proactive endeavors. In this study, we pay attention to the proactive role of the creator in influencing the evaluator’s evaluation results and emphasize the interactive dynamics between the two parties. Drawing upon the sensemaking theory and socio-political perspective of creativity, our research develops the theoretical model that investigates how the creator’s social astuteness may affect evaluators’ creativity recognition through the mediating mechanisms of novelty elaboration and usefulness championing. To validate the newly created constructs of novelty elaboration and usefulness championing, we conducted two pilot studies to validate their factor structure and internal reliabilities. We also test the proposed hypotheses by analyzing the cross-sectional data across multiple industries. Results show that creator employees who capitalize on their social astuteness can make sense of the organizational environment from a political perspective, and more importantly, initiate proactive efforts such as elaborating the novelty and championing the usefulness of generated ideas to convince evaluators and make their creativity to be recognized. Results also reveal that networking ability can interact with social astuteness and determine the extent to which employee creators may resort to elaboration behavior on novelty to promote recognition of creativity. Our research contributes to the creativity recognition literature by integrating the creator’s political sensemaking and proactive role into the creativity recognition process and delineating the dual mediation mechanism of novelty elaboration and usefulness championing between the creator’s social astuteness and evaluator’s creativity recognition result as well as untangling the moderating effect of networking ability.