Reward, Motivation and Creativity: Moderated By the Need for Power

Indeed, although many scholars and practitioners are interested in understanding how to motivate individuals to be more creative, whether and how rewards affect creativity remain unclear. Therefore, in this paperr we have examined how reward, motivation and creativity are moderated by the need for power. Specifically, the study examined how the anticipation of individually administered reward for knowledge or for skills (eg praise, recognition, reinforcement, awards, incentives, performance pay plans) was linked to the employee creative performance in the workplace with intrinsic motivation as a mediating variable of this relationship and the need for power as a moderating variable of the relationship between intrinsic motivation and creativity. Questionnaire as research instrument was used and was distributed to 301 employees from Zhongxing Telecommunication Equipment (ZTE), Baidu, Roche, along with other 6 enterprises was used. In total, 275 usable responses were analyzed through SPSS. Standard procedures were used to process and represent findings. Pearson correlation analysis and multiple regressions were then applied to test the hypotheses. Findings – The study reaches three main conclusions. First, reward for knowledge and reward for skills are positively related to employee creativity. Second, intrinsic motivation mediates the relationship between reward for knowledge and for skills with creativity. Third the need for power moderates the relationship between the intrinsic motivation and employee’s creativity such that individuals with a high need for power will exhibit intrinsic motivation for a greater creativity when reward for knowledge or reward for skill is high.