THE ROLE OF MANAGER’S PERSONALITY TRAITS IN STIMULATING AND DEVELOPING CREATIVITY IN BUSINESS: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31392/Keywords:
creativity, manager, personality traits, leadership, organisational behaviour, creativity stimulation, openness to experience, creative leadership.Abstract
This article examines the relationship between managers’ personality traits and their capacity to stimulate employee creativity within business organisations. In today's dynamic and highly competitive environment, where innovation has become a critical driver of organisational success, understanding which psychological characteristics of a leader foster the creative potential of their team is of particular relevance. The study aims to identify the key psychological predictors of creative leadership and determine the conditions under which these factors are most effective. The research draws on both theoretical methods – including analysis and synthesis of scholarly literature in personality psychology, organisational behaviour, creativity, and leadership and empirical methods: a survey of 147 mid-level managers from 28 commercial organisations using the Big Five Inventory-2 (BFI-2) and a purpose-built Creative Leadership Influence Scale (CLIS), developed on the basis of the problem-solving demand model. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, Pearson correlations, multiple regression analysis, and interaction effect testing. The findings indicate that among the Big Five personality traits, openness to experience is the strongest predictor of a manager’s ability to stimulate employee creativity (β = .22, p < .001). Conscientiousness also demonstrated a statistically significant positive effect (β = .19, p < .01), reflecting its role in supporting the implementation phase of the innovation process. The overall explanatory power of the model was R² = .57. Moderation analysis revealed that contextual factors – specifically, employee autonomy and team climate – substantially modify the relationship between personality characteristics and creative leadership behaviour: in less supportive organizational environments, openness to experience becomes an even more critical personal resource. An integrative model was developed that incorporates both individual and psychological and contextual variables in predicting creative leadership. The study concludes that effective creativity-supportive leadership is the product of a complex interaction between manager’s personality traits and the characteristics of the organizational environment. The findings carry both theoretical and practical implications and may inform management development programs aimed at enhancing the innovation capacity of teams.
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